"It doesn't look anything like her," he says. "Has the whole world gone mad? How anyone could look at those photos and see Elizabeth Short is beyond me."
Former LAPD Homicide Detective Steve Hodel's Black Dahlia Avenger is open on the table at Clifton's. John Gilmore's hawklike features scrunch in disgust as he looks the book over. In it, Hodel accuses his deceased dad, Hollywood physician Dr. George Hill Hodel, of being a serial murderer whose victims form a laundry list of some of the LAPD's most notorious unsolved cases. Among them, the brutal 1947 slaying of Elizabeth Short, known to most as "The Black Dahlia."
The photos that have gotten Gilmore's gander appear on Page 45 of Hodel's long, weepy indictment of his father. These snapshots, reproduced from a tiny album given to Hodel by his dad's widow, are what the former detective considers to be the most damaging evidence against Hodel Sr., who died in 1999. In one, a pretty girl with flowers in her hair looks downward. Another shows what Hodel says is the same gal, with full lips and a slight sneer. Hodel asserts there is "no question" that these photos show the Black Dahlia. Based on them, circumstantial evidence and speculation, Hodel came to the conclusion his father killed the Dahlia and about 20 other women in L.A. around the same time.
"These two don't even look like the same woman," laughs Gilmore, author of Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia Murder, considered by many to be a true-crime classic. "Certainly there's no similarity to Short. The shape of the face is different. The Dahlia had a very high forehead, unlike these girls. That's why she wore her hair big all the time, to conceal her high forehead."
If anyone could assess the book's claims, it would be Gilmore, who just happened to be in town around the same time a press conference was held at the Roosevelt Hotel last Friday to announce the book. The silver-haired savant and author of several tomes of noirish nonfiction spent 25 years investigating the crime. His sleuthing resulted in several controversial revelations, one being that a criminal named Jack Anderson Wilson confessed the crime to him during a series of meetings in the early '80s. The alcoholic Wilson burned to death in a fire at his SRO flat before the LAPD could close in on him. Renowned FBI profiler John Douglas states in his book The Cases That Haunt Usthat if police had been able to interrogate Wilson, the murder might have been solved.
Homicide Detective Brian Carr, keeper of the LAPD's Dahlia files, says, "It's difficult to tell," when asked if he thinks the photos on Page 45 are the Dahlia. "Pressed for an opinion, I'd say no," he adds.
"I was looking for one shred of solid evidence linking Hodel's father to the murder, and I couldn't find anything," Gilmore says dismissively, not slowing down to savor his lunch of steak and onions. "'My daddy killed the Black Dahlia.' It's not even new!"
Gilmore, who's seen his share of Dahlia dilettantes, is referring to Janice Knowlton's Daddy Was the Black Dahlia Killer. Based on recovered memories, Knowlton's book claims that she'd witnessed her father dismember Short's body. There's also Childhood Shadows, by Mary Pacios, a childhood friend of Short, suggesting Orson Welles did the deed.
Hodel's text turns wilder with each page: Two works by surrealist Man Ray inspired his father's arrangement of the corpse; an accomplice of Dr. Hodel's may have been involved in the murder of writer James Ellroy's mother; Hodel's childhood drawing of a "Chinese Chicken" is a critical piece of evidence, etc.
Why would a retired LAPD homicide detective with 24 years of experience write such gobbledygook? Hodel's manuscript suggests he had plenty to be angry about with his father. According to his book, Hodel's polyamorous father abandoned his son and family to a life of penury, living lavishly abroad after the doctor was acquitted of incest with Steve Hodel's half sister. To top it off, Steve Hodel alleges his father had an affair with Steve's ex-wife, Kiyo, a beautiful Japanese astrologer who may have married the son only to get back at the father.
Neither Steve Lopez's mildly skeptical pieces in the L.A. Times nor any of the très gullible TV segments on the book have mentioned that in the same secret scrapbook in which Hodel's dad kept the purported "Black Dahlia" photos, there were also pictures of Kiyo. Hodel's discovery of these photos after his father's death riles him.
"It would not be for another 34 years, until I saw Kiyo's picture in my father's album after his death, that the full impact of Dad and Kiyo would begin to dawn on me," he writes.
To be fair, Detective Carr says he's planning to research whether Dr. Hodel's fingerprints were ever matched against those lifted from missives sent to newspapers back then claiming to be from the "Black Dahlia Avenger." But even if some match were made, this would not link Dr. Hodel to Short's severed body, which had been washed clean before being dumped in a vacant lot at 39th Street and Norton Avenue.
