a MURDERER in the family

This is a bizarre story. No won-der it got on the New York Times Best Sellers List for weeks since it appeared in print in April of this year. It’s about a child musical genius who grows up and hangs out in Paris with the surrealists of the likes of ManRay, becomes an aspi-ring art photographer while pur-suing to be a doctor, has a string of wives including a Filipina who would later be a Congressperson, gets himself to China right after the war to serve as a doctor, returns to Los Angeles where he lives in a Mayan-inspired mansion designed by Lloyd Wright (son of Frank Lloyd) and has wild, drunken, drugged parties at about the time when a series of unsolved murders were happening.

Is that exciting yet? There’s more and that’s why this book is just the type you’d bring all over the place– to the john, to the beach, to conferences until you had wrung out every word.

This book is also about the very famous Black Dahlia Murder Case. On January 15, 1947, the body of 22-year-old Elizabeth Short is found in downtown Los Angeles, grisly cut in half and arranged in a manner that looked posed with her hands up in the air. Elizabeth’s killer had cut her mouth so that it would extend from ear to ear. The author of the book, retired LA police Detective Steve Hodel, compares the body’s pose and the widened mouth to Man Ray’s works Les Amoureux and Minotaur.

Several weeks later, another brutal murder occurs called the "Red Lipstick Case" and then there would be more in the next few years, all sordid in the way all these young women are killed and all unsolved or, as Hodel suggests, a cover-up by the police department for reasons as bizarre as the killings.

Did ManRay do it? Despite the fact that ManRay was a known fan of the Marquis de Sade and had some grisly works, the author points to Dr. George Hodel, close friend and fan of ManRay. Even before he met ManRay, Doctor Hodel had already dabbled in violent sexual fantasy, having been a publisher of a short-lived publication called Fantasia, to explore forbidden sex and violence combined.

Now, if you’re bemused that Steve Hodel happens to have the same surname as his book’s subject Dr. George Hodel, it is actually no coincidence. Steve is George’s son and his unraveling of his father’s other life is what keeps anybody reading this book in tether hooks throughout. And Steve, a very good writer (banishing residual stereotypes that detectives can’t possibly write), offers snippets of his personal anguish of having to accuse his late father throughout this incredible book.

It all started to unravel when, after George Hodel’s death in 1999, in his San Francisco high-rise apartment, Steve came across a small leather-bound album of photos which his father had last instructions to burn along with other possessions. His Japanese wife, June, decided to show it to Steve and among the photographs are two of a woman who Steve strongly believes is the victim Elizabeth Short.

Detective that he is, he pores over 50-year old LAPD and District Attorney documents surrounding the case. He goes back further, interviewing family members and delving into his father’s past. Even further, this time inwardly, as he recalls his own stiff relationship with his father, finding clues to his father’s connection to the unsolved murders.

One painful recalling would be that of his half-sister Tamar, who in 1949, as a 14-year-old, would charge her father, George Hodel, with incest during one of the wild orgies that occurred in their Los Angeles house. Tamar recounted in court that in a room with two men, one of them George, and two women, the other man first had oral sex on her, then George went down on her and had sex with her followed by another woman going down on her. Even with the evidence and the testimonies seemingly an indictment of Hodel, this was the late forties and women raped were usually accomplices to their rape. George Hodel was acquitted, his defense being that he actually hypnotized all of them and never touched Tamar.

After the trial, George Hodel moved to Hawaii and eventually the Philippines to live with his next wife, Hortensia Laguda Starke, the former Congressperson from Negros Occidental and a wealthy sugarland owner. Steve writes that his departure from Los Angeles was in the nick of time since the LAPD had George as one of the suspects of the Black Dahlia murder case and was about to collar him. When George left Los Angeles, the serial killings, Steve noted, also ended.

Steve, then seven years old, with his two brothers and a mother turned alcoholic, would move addresses frequently everytime his mother could no longer hold her jobs. At one low point, his mother dispatched him and his two brothers to the Beverly Hills Hotel with a note asking for money from the famous movie director John Huston who was once his mother’s boyfriend before she married George.

Steve, eager to be close to his father, eventually joined the Navy when he was of age and was shipped to the US Naval Base in Olongapo where he would be reunited with his father, who was by then a successful Manila businessman and already divorced from Hortensia Starke. His meetings with his father would be bittersweet. Despite the cordiality, Steve found his father to be businesslike in his treatment of him and he carried a deep resentment that George, who was living quite comfortably in Manila, was negligent in supporting his mother and brothers when they were in bad financial straits.

Steve would admit in his book that he too became an alcoholic since booze and pam-pam girls were cheap in Olongapo and, when he returned to the States, became his mother’s drinking buddy.

You would think that such resentment might have caused Steve to write this book accusing his father of being a serial killer. You haven’t heard the end of it.

At a Hollywood party that his mom brings him to, he meets a Japanese Eurasian named Kiyo and is absolutely smitten with her. He’s barely 21 years old and Kiyo looks a bit older and they have an affair which results in marriage only on one condition: that Steve doesn’t tell his siblings or his mother. Everything seems to be going great until he finds her sprawled naked with another man by the living room fireplace one night. Then he finds out that she isn’t just a bit older–like 33 as she told him–but 45 years old! And to top it all, Kiyo had been George’s young mistress years back– Yes, George, the father! Can you see now why the book is so exciting, almost–like, never mind the murders, Steve’s life alone is movie material.

Now you might think he’s got even greater reason to smear papa. I’ve asked those who’ve read this engrossing book what they thought and it’s been mixed reviews. Some say, hey, Steve’s got the goods on his father, even if Kiyo was a Hodel double treat. Others with more detective books under their belts (I prefer non-fiction) say all the findings are circumstantial. And as of July this year, the relatives of Elizabeth Short are still claiming that’s not Elizabeth’s picture in George’s photo album and the killer is still unknown.

It’s hard even for myself to render a final judgment to Steve’s sleuthing. I can only say though that the book is so gripping and so well-written with a Philippine connection that is tangentially interesting as well. In these isles, George Hodel was also reputed to be a womanizer but so far, we’ve had no unsolved cases of bisected young women from the fifties.

There’s a postscript to this book. I knew Ramon Hodel, George’s son with Hortensia Starke, and he brought me several times to see his father in San Francisco when I was living in the Bay Area in the early 90s. I found George to be very distinguished and had a friendly relationship with Ramon, who was himself a film maker. Ramon adored his father and was proud of his father’s artistic links to ManRay. Ramon once showed me his father’s home movies of Negros in the 50s, with fancy well-dressed people and servants scurrying around in front of mansions. Ramon would have been shocked by his half-brother’s revelations.

But we all have fathers and there are fathers who are less than saints. Steve’s final thoughts make for high drama. " My journey’s end revealed to me a father who was evil incarnate… the amalgamation of selfishness, cruelty and extreme brutality…He tortured, cut, and budgeoned his victims, then slowly strangled the life out of them for the pure lust and pleasure it brought him."

Thank God for little family indiscretions.