The detective uncovered the loudest murder in the US after 60 years

The actress's murder, committed 72 years ago, remains one of the most notorious unsolved cases in the United States. The former policeman is confident that he has solved the case, and that the criminal is his father, but his colleagues consider his arguments to be nonsense.

Фото: Depositphotos

The story of the brutal murder and conspiracy of the guesses traced "Lenta.ru report».

Unprecedented cruelty

Dark-haired beauty Elizabeth Short was one of many girls from the provinces who wanted to act in films. She was born in Hyde Park, a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts, in 1924, and since childhood she has loved cinema magazines. In 19 years, Short left home and went west looking for a better life. The next few years, she attended numerous screen tests, but she was not destined to achieve the Hollywood success, of which she so passionately dreamed.

The young actress met with different men. For a while, she was seriously in love with US Air Force Major Matt Gordon. The couple announced their engagement, but the wedding never took place - Gordon died in a plane crash in 1945. After the death of her fiancé, Short lived in California, and didn’t linger anywhere for long. She loved men's society and attention, accepted expensive gifts and bank checks. The girl spent large sums on expensive items, preferring hunger to bad clothes. Shortly before her death, Short wrote to her former lover about her plans to move to Chicago to begin her modeling career there. But these plans did not come true. The girl was last seen alive on January 9 1947 at the Biltmore Hotel, in downtown Los Angeles.

On the morning of January 15, the Los Angeles Police Department received a call from an agitated woman who claimed to have stumbled upon a dismembered human body at the intersection of Norton Avenue and 1947 Street. The detectives who arrived at the indicated place for a long time could not recover from what they had seen. On the grass by the road lay a naked female body, cut in half to the waist. The hands were turned over the head, and the legs were spread apart. The injuries of the girl were so terrible that eyewitnesses could not believe that someone could have done this with a living person. Traces of beating were visible all over the body of the victim, and his mouth was torn to his ears.

According to the detectives, the last three days of the life of the Short were full of pain and horror. The unprecedented cruelty with which the murder was committed, struck even experienced police officers. They drained all the blood from the victim’s body and thoroughly washed it with gasoline, which left no hope of finding fingerprints. Near the body they found a bag of cement, soaked in blood.

Scandalous sensation

The next day after the terrible discovery became a landmark for the Los Angeles Examiner newspaper - more copies were bought in the entire history of the publication only on the day of victory in the Second World War. The scandalous image of the Short created by journalists contributed to the growth in sales - it was positioned as a defiantly dressed young girl who wandered alone through the streets at night, hinting that she was an elite prostitute. Later, a childhood friend of a murdered girl recalled: "They wrote about her just awful things."

Day after day the newspapers repeated that, allegedly, shortly before her death, Elizabeth Short got the nickname Black Dahlia in imitation of the popular at that time film “Blue Dahlia”. From numerous statements by the police, it follows that this nickname was just another invention of journalists. Elizabeth’s acquaintances also deny that they have ever heard this nickname.

21 January 1947 was called to the office of the Los Angeles Examiner newspaper editor by a man who said that he had killed Elizabeth Short. He added that the editor will soon receive an important package with “souvenirs from Beth Short”. A few days later, the postman found a suspicious envelope addressed to several local publications. On the envelope was written: "Here are the things of Georgina." Inside were the birth certificate of the murdered woman, her business cards and photographs. The text on the envelope was made up of letters cut from a newspaper, but some words were written by hand.

The package was thoroughly rubbed with gasoline, as was the body of Short, and the police decided that the sender was the real killer. A few days later another message appeared in which the alleged killer indicated a place where he would wait for the police to surrender. However, the sender lied - nobody appeared at the named place. After that, he sent another letter, where he said that he had changed his mind and that Elizabeth’s murder was justified.

Attention from the press, giving rise to numerous myths about the murder, attracted strange personalities - about 60 people came to the police to confess to the killing of Short.

A note in the newspaper about the death of Elizabeth Short
Photo: Los Angeles Times

The investigation into the assassination of Elizabeth Short was one of the most ambitious and lengthy in US history. Detectives suspected every friend killed. Several thousand people were called in for questioning, and several hundred were on the suspect list. But none of them was ever convicted. Possessing a huge staff of employees and at the same time lacking sufficient evidence, the police could not bring charges against anyone, and by the spring of 1947, the case was announced as a “grouch”.

The mystery of the murder of Elizabeth Short still stirs the minds of numerous journalists and scholars. From year to year there were theories linking the killing of Short with other crimes committed in the United States at that time. For the most part, the authors of these fantastic hypotheses cannot confirm their guesses.

The murder of Elizabeth Short became part of American popular culture. He was devoted to the film "Black Orchid" with Scarlett Johansson in the lead role, the TV series "I am the Night" based on the memoirs of the granddaughter of the main suspect is based on the crime. In the bar of the hotel "Biltmore", where Short was last seen alive, they offer the popular Black Dahlia cocktail. Dozens of online detectives are posting new versions of this mysterious murder, and writers publish voluminous books.

So, a woman named Janice Knowlton put forward the version that her father was the killer of Elizabeth Short. “Her book was rubbish, all this is not true,” Sister Knowleson told the Los Angeles Times after the death of the author. “She believed in it, but in reality it was not so.”

"He's like a pit bull"

However, the case of Black Dahlia acquired a new life when a former Los Angeles police detective, Steve Hodel, took over his investigation. He was a brilliant policeman, confidently walking up the career ladder, revealing the most convoluted crimes. In 1986, Steve retired and established his private investigation agency.

After his father, a famous Hollywood doctor, died in 1999, a man had to make out his personal belongings. In one of the boxes he found an old family photo album. Some of the photographs were taken by world-renowned surrealist painter Man Ray, a friend of the family. One of the photos especially attracted the attention of Steve. She was a young girl with a gorgeous dark hair. Detective could not believe his eyes - from the picture looked at him Black Dahlia.

Steve immediately began his own investigation from scratch, delving into witness interviews and newspaper archives. The detective works in the most difficult conditions: a lot of material evidence has long been lost, most of the witnesses have died, including the detectives who conducted this case. He ensured that the FBI provided him with materials about the murder, as well as information collected about his father. So he learned that detectives already suspected George Hodel, but could not gather enough evidence.

So, the autopsy showed that the unfortunate was not just cut in half in an arbitrary place - the killer placed the cutter between the vertebrae so that all the bones were intact. This procedure could be performed only by a specially trained person. In the 1930s, this was taught in medical schools, one of which George Hodel was studying. Then the detective studied the photographs of the envelopes sent to the newspaper’s editorial office and was taken aback. The killer’s handwriting had a frightening resemblance to his father’s handwriting.

Steve was able to find receipts confirming that his father had purchased ten two-kilogram bags of cement a week before Short’s murder. The same bloodied bag was found at the scene of the crime.

For the past 20 years, Steve has been trying to collect all the evidence and evidence that has survived that linked his father to the murder of Elizabeth Short. During this time, he has published four books and maintains his personal blog, which reveals the terrible personality of his father. His first book, Black Dahlia Avenger: The True Story, is more than a hundred pages of evidence, listed in chronological order, like the logs of police officers. Despite the specific format, it hit the The New York Times bestseller list.

“He’s like a pit bull,” Kelly Hodel, the author’s brother commented on the book’s release. “After he plunged his teeth into prey, he would not let it go.”

In 2001, Steve asked Stephen Kay, who works at the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office, to review the evidence he had gathered. He was still not sure that his father had committed this terrible crime. But he knew for sure that he had excavated enough new materials to bring the case back.

Six weeks later, Stephen Kay commented on the detective’s work with the following words: “Thanks to the remarkable detective work of the brave son of Dr. George Hodel, the doctor’s name will be covered with disgrace.” He also added that if George were alive, he would sue his son.

Only after such a high appreciation of his works, did Steve start writing a book in order to share his story with the world. According to the son of a detective, he got up every day at five in the morning and worked with incredible perseverance on the manuscript.

After the first book of the detective was released, as if on a click of fingers, new evidence of his father’s guilt began to emerge. Steve Lopez, a Los Angeles Times columnist, undertook to write a review of the Chodel book and, during work on the fact-checking, came across a transcript of listening to the doctor’s house, which had been established by the police on the basis of suspicion of another murder.

Most of the transcript contains nothing remarkable, except for one detail. 19 February 1950 of the year in 20.25 detectives made notes: “Female cry. Again a female cry (it should be noted that the female voice was not heard until that moment). ” Then one day he dropped the reckless phrase: “Suppose I killed Black Georgina. They will not be able to prove anything. They will no longer be able to interrogate my secretary because she is dead. ”

The doctor has attracted the attention of the police before. In October, 1949, he was accused of seducing Tamar's 14-year-old daughter. At the trial, three witnesses claimed that they had seen George Godel sticking to his daughter, but the mother had sided with her husband, so he was acquitted. Due to the fact that he was a suspect in the case of harassment, a year later, the police included him in a huge list of alleged killers of Elizabeth Short.

The secretary mentioned in the transcript was Ruth Spalding. She died from a drug overdose. Thanks to the data obtained as a result of listening to the house doctor, for some time he was suspected of killing a female employee. But there was no other evidence from the police, and this case had to be closed. It was later found that Spalding planned to blackmail the boss: the girl knew that he deliberately put the patients in the wrong diagnosis in order to conduct additional tests and treatment.

Steve Hodel talks a lot about his father's friendship with surrealist painter Maine Ray. George admired the works of Ray, and two of them - "Lovers" and "Minotaur" - have a frightening resemblance to Elizabeth's disfigured body. Steve argues that George thus imitated a friend. “Father’s madness was directly related to his belief in surrealism. He was a nihilist, woman-hater and a sadist of the highest order. ”

Ripped thread

For Steve, his father's case is like a thread in a sweater: you gently pull her, thinking that she is about to end, and she continues to drag on - and in his investigation every new evidence leads to something new, and sometimes to another crime .

Steve was able to find the thread that connects his father with dozens of murders committed across California, and eventually began to suspect that his father was the legendary killer of the Zodiac.

After the release of the first book by Steve Chodela, the success was overwhelming. However, after stating that his father might also be responsible for the crimes of the zodiac, interest in his work began to fade. Readers decided that the detective was too carried away by his obsession. One of the Los Angeles Police Department officers, Brian Carr, critically commented on the investigation of the detective writer: “I don’t have time to prove or disprove what this man says. I’m overwhelmed with other things that may still be revealed. ”

Steve has long abandoned attempts to influence law enforcement officers: "My readers are my judges and jurors."

In August, 2018, the detective was able to find another confirmation of his theory: a handwritten letter to the police from an informant, in which George Hodel was named the killer of Elizabeth Short. Steve also found a telegram from George’s third wife to his former lover, which says: “Your guess about George is true, can you help the children and me to run away from home today, if this is possible.”

“I loved my father,” adds Steve. - I was sure that I could prove that he was not related to these crimes. I could not get".

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