Memory Attic
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Black Dahlia Murder Solved?

A grisly discovery on the morning of January 14, 1947 shocked both Los Angeles and the entire nation: the eviscerated and dismembered body of a 22-year-old woman, Elizabeth Short, was discovered in a weedy, vacant lot at the corner of Norton Avenue and 29th Street in Leimert Park, a section of Los Angeles.
The Los Angeles Times, in a column by Steve Lopez [April 11, 2003], reports that Steve Hodel, a retired Los Angeles Police Department homicide detective, has written a startling book -- one that not only seems to solve the 56-year-old mystery, but names Hodel's father, Dr. George Hodel, as the murderer. Black Dahlia Avenger is in bookstores now.
Hodel says his father hosted racy parties at their home, where young women, like Short, would gather with luminaries like photographer Man Ray and film director John Huston. Hodel cleared 80% of his cases while active with LAPD.
In the book, Hodel says his father was perhaps responsible for 20 murders during the 1940s and ‘50s; murders that were covered up. Dr. Hodel ran a VD clinic, and had files, apparantly, on scores of city and county officials who had visited him for the cure.
But Steve Hodel is not the only one who thinks his father was the Dahlia’s killer. Steve Kaye prosecuted the Manson family, and is still a procesutor for LA County. “He got his man,” the Times quotes him as saying. Over the years, Kaye has worked on numerous cases with Hodel.
Steve seems to have stumbled across the whole thing. When Dr. Hodel died in 1999, Steve went through his father's personal effects [at the request of his father's wife] ... and discovered two photographs that seemed somehow familiar, but ones he could not immediately identify. Soon he realized who the woman in the photos might be. He found several published pictures of Short, and they matched.
When he begin to research the case, notes that had been published in newspapers at the time showed that the killer’s handwriting was strikingly close to his father’s. The writing also matched, he thought, the message scrawled in lipstick on Jean French [another mured victim not long after the Dahlia]; he sent samples and copies to a handwriting expert, who said it was “highly probable” that the writing was that of a single person, according to the article.
Clues continued to mount up:
Hodel’s older brother, Joe, recalls their father writing on a topless woman at a party…with red lipstick.

Joe Barret once rented a room from the Hodels. He recalls Mrs. Hodel telling him, over 50 years ago, that Dr. Hodel was a suspect in the murders. Further, Barrett claims the District Attorney’s office asked him to spy on George.
Steve’s sister, Tamar, had accused her father of molesting her when she was 14; he fled the counrty and was absent for 40 years. She further claimd that she'd been molested at parties, and that her father sent her away for an abortion. But she says his lawyer had a campaign to ruin her, characterizing her as promiscuous and a pathological liar. The senior Hodel was acquitted.

-- more to come --

New York City, named by Americans as the most dangerous, least attractive, and rudest city in a recent poll, is also, strangely enough, Americans’ top choice as the city where they would most like to live or visit on vacation. Go fig.
On average, clergymen, lawyers, and doctors each have 15,000 words in their vocabulary. Skilled workers who haven't had a college education know between 5,000 and 7,000 words. Farm laborers, about 1,600
Shades of Tang® and Space-Food Sticks® !! Astronaut John Glenn ate the first meal in space when he ate pureed applesauce squeezed from a tube aboard Friendship 7 in 1962.
"Forget it, Louis. No Civil War picture has ever made a nickel."
- Irving Thalberg, referring to MGM making Gone With the Windin 1939.
"He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice."
- Albert Einstein
"Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors... and miss."
-- Robert A. Heinlein
"Yield to temptation. It may not pass your way again."
--Robert A. Heinlein
The nickname "Tinsel Town" was coined by Oscar Levant, the pianist and composer, who observed: "Strip the phoney tinsel off Hollywood, and you'll find the real tinsel underneath."
Privacy invasion and the need for heightened protection is not a new problem for film stars. In the 1920s, cinema idol Rudolph Valentino was forced to take drastic security measures because fans continually invaded his home and pilfered his belongings as mementos. A 9-foot-tall stucco wall and huge flood lights were erected at his Benedict Canyon mansion to keep female fans out. Additionally, three Great Danes, two Italian mastiffs, and one Spanish greyhound ran loose through the courtyard and terrace as sentries.
The British Broadcasting Company played the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in all its broadcasts to Europe during World War II. The familiar "dah-dah-dah-DAAAAH" opening is the same as Morse code for the letter "v" (dot-dot-dot-dash) — the symbol adopted for "victory."
"Drinking in excess is plainly on the decrease. And with every step in this direction the self-respect of the people must grow, pauperism decrease, and an enlightened conception of public duty develop. Whatever else the twentieth century brings about, we may reasonably look for a great revolution in the political status of the world."
- Charles Morris, The Marvelous Record of the Closing Century, 1899.
"Within a few more years, large numbers of terminally ill or hopelessly aged patients will be frozen prior to death and stored for reanimation in the future, when cures are developed for their illnesses or techniques of age reversal become available."
- Paul Segall, UC Berkeley grad student, on the physiology of aging, 1980. He was certain that by 1992 "the first human will be successfully resuscitated after being frozen and thawed."
"I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year."
- The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957