The Minotaur

[BIRDS CHIRPING] Rudevival is a production of C13 originals, a division of Cadence 13, in partnership with TNT. This story contains strong language and graphic and potentially disturbing content. Discretion is advised. [SCREAMING] A $5,000 reward will be offered on the program immediately following this announcement. [MUSIC PLAYING] You out there. You who think you've committed the perfect crime, the perfect murder? That there are no clues, no witnesses. That your identity is unknown. Listen. Sun. Yes, you wherever you may be, no matter where you're hiding. Somewhere, sometime, someone's listening to this program is going to bring you to justice. We ask you then to please listen carefully, for you may be the one to win this reward. This is a radio show called "Somebody Knows" from 1950. Three years after Elizabeth's short's body was discovered on January 15, 1947, the investigation was ongoing, and the public was still captivated by it. It is our intention to keep the files open when the death of Elizabeth's short till we've obtained the arrest and conviction of her killer. The considering investigation to be still very much alive, although at this time, the identity of the murderer still remains unknown. Unknown? No. The killer of Elizabeth's short is not unknown. Somewhere in whatever town or city this person is hiding, someone if he was seen here today has spoken through it, deep in lunch and dinner with him. Knows the location of his father, he even took her over three and a half years ago. Knows the cold blood killer who took the life of the Black Valley is not unknown. Right up there, radio. Let me tell you all a story. Back in episode two, we told you that our great-grandfather, George Hodele, was one of several names on a suspect list in the Black Dahlia case, but he was never arrested, and the case went ice cold. This episode, decades later, the case heats up. As retired LAPD homicide detective Steve Hodele investigates a suspect, he never could have imagined. His own father. Welcome to "Rude of Evil," the true story of the Hodele family and the Black Dahlia. I'm Yvette, and I'm her sister, Rasha, and we're your hosts. As far as the neighborhood, it's somewhat changed, but not greatly, really. There are new structures, of course, new apartment buildings and stuff. But the main differences have to do with traffic, much heavier now. Of course, the other strange thing that you have to factor in is that because I worked Hollywood homicide for so long, this was my division. This is our great uncle, Steve Hodele. He's driving down Franklin Avenue in Hollywood, California. It's the same street where Steve lived with his father, George Hodele, in the Franklin House. And it's also right in the center of his former beat as a homicide detective. When I reflect back on my life and my personal career as a police officer and a detective, I could have become anything. I wanted to become a marine biologist. I could have been a doctor, a lawyer, following my father's footsteps and be a physician. But I always enjoyed being of service. I know it's a cliche, but it was true in my part. And I think most cops are motivated, certainly not the money. They're motivated by something else, and it's the desire to help, to be of assistance, to do good. We're passing Beachwood Drive, and that building just up there, I made an arrest of the lone ranger rapist who was probably good for, we estimate, around 40 rapes of women in the neighborhood here, over a four-year period. It was an interesting arrest. I was working the sex crimes detail as a detective. And we were really frustrated. We had so many rapes unsolved, and we just couldn't catch this guy. He was called a lone ranger rapist, because when he went in, he would put a lone ranger mask. But it was really a sleeping mask with no eyes, so it was solid. But he'd put that over the victim, and he'd rape them. Mainly they talked about his high pitch of voice, very unique. We had a general description of a man at that time. I think it was in his mid-to-late 20s, and a height weight. And he had mentioned to one of the victims in conversation, as he was raping. He mentioned his astrological sign was Taurus. Anyway, I was so frustrated I had a task force going. We couldn't catch this guy. Finally, I said, fuck it. I got myself another partner. I said, let's work this for three days. I know the area well, and his crimes are usually from midnight to six in the morning. So I said, let's just go out there and play and close and see what we can come up with. Anyway, we did it the first night, not a second night, not a partner at the time, said, screw this, Steve. He said, this was a waste of time. I said, let's just give it another couple of days. So that night, we went out, and we're up two in the morning. We're staked out over in an area here, just sitting there. And we see this guy walking down the street. And I just get this feeling that this is it. So we get out and we stop in and say, you know, police officers, we've had some real-- I have problems in the neighborhood. We've got some IDs. And now I don't have any ID on me. So it's back up my apartment. That's where you live. And he says, over on Beachwood off of Franklin, which was about a mile away. And he had this high pitched voice. And so I'm writing out what we call the FY card field interrogation card. And I said, your birth name, David Wilson, address, and give me on Beachwood. And I said, your birth date, he says, a May 6. And so I'm thinking, no, a tourist put it in the car, taking back to his apartment. And he gets his driver's license. And we're in the apartment. And I said, you don't have any stolen car stereos, do you? He says, no, I said, would you mind if I look? This is no open up the top drawer. And here's the black mask there. Rubber gloves, which he used on a lot of his crimes. And it turned out he was a security guard at a hospital. Anyway, we finally caught him convicted at Amsterdam prison as I'm driving by. Oh, there's David Wilson, the lone ranger rapist I arrested in there. Steve Hodell had become a police officer in 1963. At a time when chief Bill Parker was cultivating a new clean cut image for the LAPD. And I was part of that whole image that was bored out of drag net. Chief Bill Parker's new breed. I was kind of like out of central casting for that. Tall thin back in those days. So four or five years in patrol, and then I graduated to or gravitated to detectives. And I worked all the different tables. I worked juvenile burglary, auto theft, sex crimes, robbery. And then finally, I went to the homicide table. I loved working detectives in general, but I really loved working homicide. Who'd done it? I had a burning desire to get to the truth of it. Wherever that took me. During his career as a homicide detective in LA, Uncle Steve worked over 300 murders. And he had one of the highest solvrates in the LAPD. I may not have been the brightest bulb on the tree, but I excelled in determination. My nature of persevering is what really has kept me moving on all my cases, kind of a bulldog temperament, where I would just stick with it and keep digging till I found the bone. I didn't want to give up a call case. But by the time he joined the force, it seemed like the LAPD had given up on the black dial you came. 16 years after the murder, it was little more than a teaching tool to recruits. You know, when I went through the police academy, one of the things they did was one of the hour things was some photographs of the Black Dahlia murder because it was our most famous unsolved. You know, this is the Black Dahlia murder. I didn't know her name. I didn't know any of the details. The hotel name never came up anywhere in anything ever. For more than 50 years, there had been no movement in the case. It wasn't even being investigated. Steve had retired to Bellingham, Washington, and after many years of little to no contact with his father, they were beginning to rebuild their relationship. Then on May 17, 1999, Steve got a phone call from his father's wife, June Hodell. The phone rings and it's June and she's hysterical. She says the paramedics are here. They've just pronounced him dead. He was 91. So I immediately get on a flight, organized, fly down from Bellingham to San Francisco. She's totally distraught. I mean, June loved him for 30 years. They'd been together. So she brings out a note and at the top of its entitled The Notes for J.H. June Hodell. And it was kind of a, you know, it's time for me to exit stage right now before something serious happens. I'll quit at the top of my game type of thing. He was suffering from congestive heart failure and he's written prescriptions for second all and she's acquired enough for it to become lethal dosage. It was a suicide note. He decided to take his life and he goes on to say destroy all of my personal effects. Everything. These are not instructions. These are orders for her. But June kept one thing of George's, a photo album and she passed it along to Steve. He was giving a photo album, a family members and stuff and there was one of those photographs. It was a beautiful dark-haired woman and black dahlia comes to mind. I don't know what the source was on that. Might have been a TV movie I'd seen in the 70s called Who Is The Black Dahlia. Looked just like her. I looked at the picture and I don't know where the black dahlia came from except I think it was probably because she looked so much like that picture in the TV movie I'd seen. Now the other possibility, and I tend to lean more on this, is that I had heard the name. I had heard something in my childhood. You know either at the Franklin House or something about black dahlia. There were a lot of people that knew about it back then. But I have no conscious memory of anybody ever saying anything about black dahlia. But whatever it was, this was kind of like an in and out thing for me. I didn't put much thought to it. Then just a few days later he got another call from someone he hadn't spoken to in decades. His half-sister and our grandmother, Tamara Hodell. Within two or three days, I'm on the phone in Tamar and I are having these long conversations. But one of the first things she says to me is, well, you know, our father was a suspect in the black dahlia murder. And I'm saying, Tamar, where is this coming from? In Episode 3, we told you that during the incest trial, George Hodell's defense attorney announced that Tamar had said that her father was the black dahlia murderer and that he had a lust for blood, that he was insane. That comment sealed the defense's argument that Tamar was a pathological liar and helped George get acquitted. But as it turns out, she didn't make this up. When she was in juvenile hall, the detectives who were bringing her two and from court had told her that her father was a suspect in the murder. And that they also suspected him of killing Ruth Spalding, his secretary. Tamar never forgot hearing that information. And when George died, she told her half-brother. Event and I heard the stories all the time growing up. But believe it or not, Steve had never heard anything about it. A lot of people have said, wait a minute, this is your half sister and she knew that he was a suspect in the black dahlia and she never told you this. Well, the fact is I had maybe 20 minutes of conversation in 50 years with Tamar. I got a couple of phone calls from her asking for money to bail her out. She was under arrest for possession of marijuana or something. And could I come up with a thousand dollars to help her out? I mean, literally no more than 10 minutes conversation in 40 or 50 years. So no, I was never asked or it never came up that she said this. I was told later that she told her children that they were aware of this. But it never came up. When our separate ways, she kind of got into six drugs in alcohol and the black sheep of the family became a cop. So we just never really had conversation until after dad's death. So I said to myself, well, I'm going to have to absolutely show that he had nothing to do with us. There's no way he would be capable of a crime like that. So my initial investigation was to clear him to totally exonerate him. After 14 years in retirement, Steve was back at it. This time to disprove his own fathers involvement in the Black Dahlia murder. You couldn't make this up. The mind wouldn't even go there. I don't think to make up a story like this. I mean, you couldn't even conceive of it. I don't think. And if you did and you walked in, pitch it to some studio, they'd say, get that. Like out of here, are you crazy? You know, you're absolutely crazy. But when Steve first began searching for information, he saw the taunting letters that the killer had sent to the LA Times and the LAPD. And he recognized the handwriting. So he gathered the few letters that his father had written to him, as well as copies of the Black Dahlia letters and sent them out for a mythology analysis. He also found out that the LAPD had suspected a doctor with surgical experience as the killer. These were connections to his father, but nothing substantial. Then Steve began to study the crime scene. We've just come six miles south of the Franklin House, do south from Hollywood. This area is known as Lamert Park. Now you can see it's a neatly manicured, nice homes, middle-class area. The fact that it was a huge open area. And where we're standing now is actually a location chosen by the killer to pose the body. He had by that surgically bisect of the body. And it was in the car and he had used cement sacks and manure sacks, large 50-pound paper sacks, not to put the parts inside, but on top of and to cover. Probably to protect the car from getting bloody. He pulled up here to this location where we're standing, which is the 3,800 block of south Norton. And he got out and he was seen by a witness who was standing maybe a half a block away across the vacant lot and daylight was just breaking. He removed the body parts. Carefully posed the upper torso maybe 12 inches from the the west curb line here. And then he came back and he carefully posed the lower torso, the lower body. Next to it juxtaposed just a little bit off. He was here about four minutes, according to the witness. He took off and drove away in a dark 1936 or 37 black sedan. My dad at that time was driving a 1936 black packer. So I'm walking over here and basically about eight inches into the grass here in front of this residence is where the body was posed. He was placed right here in this position here. He had placed the arms above the The head looked like would be a surrender position. If you look north, you can see the Hollywood sign. So it's literally in the shadow of the famous Hollywood sign. And it was carefully posed. It wasn't done. Police were very clear about that. It was carefully put here. The individual wanted it to be found. It was making a statement. Shortly into his investigation, Steve was given some unique evidence from the scene that he was unaware had even existed. The original detective Harry Hansen's granddaughter had contacted me. And she found a box with crime scene photos. I met her and she turned them over. So I actually had photographs that the public didn't even have. And I'm not even sure the police had because a lot of them had disappeared. Steve studied the photos for months. And he locked in on the way the body was posed. So being this deliberate and wanting to make this public statement constantly nagged at me and it was like, why is he doing this? I had no answer to it other than this was all a deliberate statement. So probably another six months passed and I was interviewing various witnesses collecting data information and stuff. I had relocated to Los Angeles by then. And I was in my apartment and I had the photographs on a court board. And I was like, he's trying to tell us something here. What is he saying? What is he trying to tell us? Allow me to introduce myself. I don't know who my public is going to be but they must surely know who I am. This is Man Ray. You first heard Man Ray's name in episode three. He was one of the most famous surrealist artists and he spent a lot of time at the Franklin House. I was born many years ago in 1890. I don't feel that old although many people have told me that they thought I was dead. I seem to have become a legend and all legends are supposed to be of the past. They tell us that what distinguishes the human race from other species, what makes it superior is its capacity for laughter. But I have seen donkeys and monkeys laughing themselves into hysteria watching the human race. Know what distinguishes our race and only through a few representations of it is the capacity for creating gratuitous emblems as if we are gods freed from the necessity of survival. I want to say a few words about my activity as a photographer. To most people this is a problem or rather I should say a puzzle. Am I a photographer or am I a painter? Well do I have to choose between the two? Why can't I have both? I am greedy. I do many other things too. Some of which I cannot even mention here. It's very important when you talk about surrealism to accept that women are meant to be subservient, surrendering, giving up their sexuality, giving up their autonomy, independence. They exist in service to the art. That is why they exist and that is why they are depicted in that way. That's Professor Neil Baldwin. Neil spoke in episode three about surrealist art and its ideas and influences including the dream world. In addition to being a professor in the College of V Arts at Montclair State University, Neil also wrote the critically acclaimed biography, Man Ray, American artist. I think even more pertinent is the idea of taking a woman's body and making it into something else. But it's not just objectification, it's the power of the artist to do this. Man Ray's attitude toward photography when it came to photographing nude women was very phallic. He made no pretense that it wasn't and he liked the power and he liked the aiming of the lens and he liked telling women which way to face and telling women which angle he wanted. The manipulation was a big thing with him, not just manipulation of the physical body but mental manipulation and that's why his portraits are so effective because he knew how to get people to look like they really looked for him and that was his power. We mentioned in episode three that Tamara said Man Ray took nude photos of her at the Franklin House when she was 12 years old. Man Ray often took photos of the Hodele family and some of them were in George's photo album that Steve was given after his father died. And so Steve began to look into Man Ray, his art and his relationship with George Hodele. Okay, so this is 1245 North Vine Street which is known as the Villa Elén and this was Man Ray's home back in the 1940s. His apartment here, apartment number 10, they were constantly together back and forth and sharing thoughts and ideas. Man Ray was much more than just a passing acquaintance that George knew in the 40s. They were very, very close. He was our family photographer. He took photographs of us three boys, of mother and his wife Juliet. I'm sure that Juliet and my mother Dorothy were lovers. She was very openly bisexual with my mother and proud of it. It was a very intimate relationship between Man Ray and George and Juliet and Dorothy or Dr. Rarrow was my father colder. And dad would come over here regularly and Man Ray would of course be a regular visitor at the Franklin House. He did not suffer fools gladly. This Hodele die must have been a kindred spirit to him. There's no question he would not have spent as much time with him. Man Ray and George they felt alike and part of my father's personal madness had to do with surrealism. He was a frustrated artist himself. He really wanted to be an artist but he was a scientist and a doctor. But in his heart he really wanted to accomplish what they were accomplishing. It has always been my dream to do something that would mystify and shock the rest of the surrealists. No fun mystifying or shocking the public. How can they expect it to be impressed with anything which they give to minutes of attention to, something to which I have given all my lifetime to. I'm way ahead of them. I would like to do something that would mystify or shock the surrealist. I haven't succeeded yet. But this idea of shocking or mystifying, the question of whether a man's work is sincere or not. Is he trying to fool the public? That is all nonsense. When a man does a picture or writes a poem that seems to be shocking, he does it primarily to shock himself. He has to do something to move himself, to give himself a shock, to mystify himself. [BLANK_AUDIO] is saying it with himself, not with the public. If incidentally it does move or affect the public in the same way, then I think he has succeeded admirably in expressing himself or expressing this desire for mystery and the shock. - I had a number of books by Man-Rite of his photographs. And I have a large book that I was going through when I was going page by page. And I, it's halfway through. But I look at this photograph and it's titled The Minotaur. - In Greek mythology, the Minotaur was the monster that was half man, half bull. He was kept inside the labyrinth and fed on young virgins. - I knew that the Minotaur was like those surrealists adopted pet, that they used it in a lot of their paintings and stuff. But this photograph was a woman bisected in half. Her arms carefully posed above her head and the lower half below. And I looked at this and it just was like I flashed on Elizabeth Short in the crime scene. I said, "This is a woman." She's posed in this position and she surgically bisected. That was kind of my first aha moment. It was kind of like a door into my father's mind. It was just like one of these kind of flash moments where this is it, this is why he did it. He's paying homage to his old friend, Manuel Ray. - Steve made more connections between the body of Elizabeth Short and some of Manuel's other works. Among them, his most famous painting called "Loveurs' Lips." It's been described as the quintessential surrealist painting. It's a giant set of lips that represents the devouring woman. Steve connected it to the slashing of Elizabeth Short's mouth. In Manuel Ray's 1943 painting called "La Kivo'ke," the female model is topless. And instead of having a face, she has crosshatch marks like a large tic-tac toe board. You might remember from episode two that Elizabeth Short's right hip had the exact same crosshatching sliced into it with a scalpel. One Manuel Ray collection includes a photograph of his wife Juliet posed on their couch with her eyes shut. Like in a dream, in the exact position that Elizabeth Short's body was posed. In all, Steve has made up to 10 distinct connections between the Black Dahlia and Manuel Ray's art. - It's not like Manuel Ray was complicit in the murder. I don't think that's the point. I think more of the point though is that the surrealist connection is very feasible to me. The imagery of the corpse, the way the corpse was configured on the ground. It really struck me immediately as a classic, surreal configuration. The position of the arms above the head is very typical. And then the way the torso is not just separated from the legs, but moved laterally so the legs are sort of of themselves. They're coming down, but they're of themselves and laterally from the bottom of the torso. Manuel Ray was very into that. In a lot of his photographs of women, they are truncated or partly dismembered, visually covered by a shadow or the head is above the frame or the legs are below the frame or the arm is out of the frame. And I think that also comes across in me where the corpse was displayed in the murder. And the destruction and the bifurcation and the cutting, you know, literal cutting of the mouth and all these features. To me, this is that anger part of surrealism. And again, this goes back to the dream consciousness. Like sometimes in a dream, everything is so finely drawn. That's like the way that it invades your mind and sticks with you. And then as you go through the day after you wake up, it starts to lose its trail and it starts to lose its coherence as you go through the day. So it's sort of like this exquisite corpse layout, you know, that leaps out at you and you see that it had to have been arranged by somebody. And then maybe as a defense mechanism, as you go through the day and think about or reflect upon it, it starts to lose its coherence. And that reminded me of what he did with the body. A body has a narrative, a coherent unity to it, and then he made it so it didn't. He made this body into something that didn't have any sense. And that all sort of rushed into my mind when I looked at these photographs of this woman lying there. When I looked at it, I thought, "Oh, that's why he wants me to talk about it." 'Cause I have this background in looking at art that looks like that. And so when I saw it, I realized why you wanted to talk to me about it. This was his masterpiece, and not only was it an homage to Man Ray and other surrealists, it was also kind of a one-upmanship. It was, you guys, you know, talk the talk, I'd walk the walk. Her body was his canvas, and his scalpel was his paintbrush. This would become recognized, and I'm absolutely positive that his fellow surrealists got it. And they knew it after the fact. And in reality, as a young boy, he wanted to become an artist and a creator. And actually, when you look at it in the field of coming from surrealism, there's nothing more surreal than this crime and her body. I was not only chilled to the bone, I was really horrified by the fact that he could do such a sadistic act. It threw me into a place where I actually, in my mind, was reliving his actual acts at the Franklin House, where the murder occurred. And going through it and doing all of these horrible sadistic acts to her body, while she's still alive and making all those connections, it was horrifying. You know, I've been through every possible motion you could go through, but this emotion at that time was super anger. It really showed me the monster within the man. I referred him as a jetteline hide, and this was the hide in his Ross Puris form. It was horrifying for me. For Steve, what started out as an investigation to exonerate George Hodele, had become something entirely different. He was now absolutely convinced that not only had his father savagely tortured and murdered Elizabeth Short, but that he had done it in the Franklin House. The same house where George impregnated his daughter Tamar. The house Steve and his brothers grew up in. In my training and my years of detective work with 300 murders under my belt, I've been trained to be objective and to not overly emote. But this was a different situation where we're not talking about some unknown suspect out there that I'm looking for. This is my father. His blood is flowing through me. He created me and there was always a love for him. And in the last 10 years of his life, we had become much closer. So in a way I was psychologically bisected, like she was surgically in the sense that I loved my father. I felt close to him and then to realize that this monster was within him. It was very traumatic for me. But the thing that got me through it is that I've had the training to kind of force myself to be objective. Almost every crime you go on, you have to be able to remove yourself from the horror. That was always operative in me. But one of my most difficult times was once I got inside his mind and walk around in the horrors that were within it. By this point, the letter Steve had sent out for handwriting analysis had come back as a match. His father's handwriting was the same as the writing on some of the taunting letters sent by the killer to the police and newspapers. He'd made other connections too. And he presented his investigation to Steve K, the former deputy DA of Los Angeles. After looking at the file, Steve K said that if George Hodeau were alive, he'd take the case to trial. And he believed he'd win. With that vote of confidence, in 2003, Steve Hodeau released his first book, "Black Dahlia Avenger," which became a New York Times bestseller. But the story was just beginning. Because up to that point, all Steve had was a compelling theory. What he didn't realize was that back in 1950, planted within the walls of the Franklin House, were microphones. [MUSIC PLAYING] Break up that radio. On the next episode of "Rude of Evil," there's psychopaths and there's social paths. And I tried to figure out which one my mother was. It's the story of what would become of Tomar Hodeau after the incest trial. If I had been her and experiencing going through the things that she had done, I would never have turned around and done to my kids. I can't forgive. If I could say anything to Tomar right now, I would tell her, fuck you. "Rude of Evil" is an eight episode series, produced by C-13 originals, a division of Cadence 13 in partnership with TNT. [MUSIC PLAYING]