Episode 105: The Black Dahlia 2 - The Hodel Family

Was Dr. George Hodel the murderer of The Black Dahlia? Was he also a serial killer? 

⚠️ There aren't enough trigger warnings for me to put on this episode. Almost any psychologically upsetting topic is covered here, so please, use discretion. 

Links:

https://open.spotify.com/show/5pi39okDAFEW9h9d3iA9Z1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hodel

https://stevehodel.com/

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Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

The podcast episode delves into the disturbing history of the Hodel family, focusing on George Hodel, a suspect in the 1947 Black Dahlia murder. The episode details George's troubled life, including his multiple marriages, sexual misconduct, and potential involvement in the murder of Elizabeth Short. Fauna Hodel, George's granddaughter, uncovers her family's dark past, including her biological mother Tamar's abuse and George's manipulative behavior. The episode also explores the impact of George's actions on his family and the broader implications of unsolved crimes and cover-ups.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Black Dahlia, Elizabeth Short, George Hodel, Fauna Hodel, Tamar Hodel, incest, murder, DNA evidence, surrealist art, Laurel Canyon, moral trial, wiretaps, Man Ray, John Huston, conspiracy theories.

Welcome to con-sara-cy theories. Are you ready to ask questions you shouldn't and find information you're not supposed to know? Well, you're in the right place. Here is your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in tonight. I want to conclude with my second episode about the Black Dahlia. In the first episode, it meant something to me to talk about Elizabeth short, because as time goes by. This was something that happened in the 1940s and it's become almost like a pop culture reference, like, oh, The Black Dahlia Murder. It's still unsolved, and it's so creepy, we have the tendency to forget that the victim was a real person. It's not a story out of a novel or out of a movie. This really happened to an actual human being, and now I want to shift gears and look at the insanity around the hotel family. There aren't enough warnings here. I was trying to think about how I wanted to do that, and it's like, other than making a huge blanket statement of viewer discretion, is advised, or, I guess in this case, listener, discretion is advised, trigger warnings all over the place, because we're going to be talking about physical, mental, emotional, verbal, sexual, spiritual abuse, torture, incest, murder, suicide, if you are even remotely thinking, I don't think that I've got the stomach for this, or I don't think that this is a place that I should go, then don't just don't go here, because it is really quite something. I'm going to be drawing from information that Steve O'Dell has made public, as well as information that was made public in the root of evil podcast that was released several years ago. I think it was released in 2019 I remember listening to it, maybe like 2020, 2021, I remember it's during the pandemic years, and I was sitting here working and listening to it at the same time thinking, I cannot effing believe this. This is so crazy every time that you think it can't get weirder or it can't possibly get worse, it does it 100% does so if any of this sounds like you know it might be something that's not appropriate for me to listen to, then don't take this as your opportunity to abandon ship. If you're still with me, I will assume that you're ready to get into the real murky depths of this situation, and what does it have to do with conspiracies? Well, for one thing, we're just asking the question, who actually did kill Elizabeth short, was there a cover up involved? Why is it still quote, unquote unsolved all these years later, especially when you know by the evidence that Steve has produced, we have a pretty damn compelling subject and some DNA evidence like, why would it still be unsolved? Things that just make us say, Hmm.

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When I was thinking about how to organize this episode. I had good intentions of making it linear, but that's a tall order, because there really is no one set point. There's no one place where you can dive in and feel like, okay, I understand exactly what's going on. It's just too convoluted. It's just too crazy. I will try to keep it simple, and I will try to unravel as many threads as I can in a not confusing way. But I might have to be superhuman to really pull that off, because there's a lot here. So I will start at roughly the same place that the root of evil podcast does, and that's with a woman named fauna hotel. She was born on August 1, 1951 and she was given up for adoption.

There was a woman working in a casino in Nevada. So this is like the Sparks, Nevada area. There's this woman, an African American woman, working in a casino named Jimmy. And a woman approaches Jimmy and says, there's a white girl that's pregnant with a biracial baby. The father is black, and we're concerned that with prejudice being the way that it is, this kid is going to have a really tough road ahead. It should be raised by a family of color and not by white. People, and Jimmy just laughs The woman off. She thinks the whole thing is crazy, but the woman comes back like, Hey, by the way, remember, I told you there was a biracial baby. Don't you want this baby? Can't you take this baby? Now, Jimmy is an alcoholic, and she's married to a minister. The minister thinks that if Jimmy adopts this baby, then Jimmy might stop drinking, which, you know, face palm. We're all probably doing that right now. Like, oh no, dude, that's not how it works. Anytime somebody decides to have a baby, to repair a broken marriage, to get their life back on track, to have unconditional love, to stop drinking or any other addiction. It never works out that way. Unless you want to have a kid, to have a kid and to raise a human being, you're on very thin ice. They don't have any kids. The preacher husband supports it. So Jimmy indeed takes this baby. Well, the baby is white. It is Caucasian. The baby Furthermore, has strawberry blonde hair and blue eyes. But the whole shtick here is she will get darker as time goes on, and in fact, later on, as an adult, fauna wrote a memoir titled, one day she'll darken, because that's what she was told. Like, at some point, your skin color will deepen and it will be obvious that you're biracial. But that never happened, and she's pale and light skinned. She tries to lay out in the sun with like baby oil and cooking oil to get a sun tan, but she has the tendency to burn more than to tan. She carries her birth certificate around with her because people don't believe her. She's living with black people in a black neighborhood in the 1950s and she's an obvious little white Caucasian girl, and so she has a lot of questions, a lot of raised eyebrows. It's like, Who are you really? Where? Where did you come from? You're clearly not biracial. So what's the story? And she grows up with this inner turmoil, like, Well, who am I? Who is my birth mother, and then who is my birth father? Because I have this legal document. I have a birth certificate saying that my father was black, but I don't, quote, unquote, look African American. I'm clearly a Caucasian child. So what's happening? And so she felt out of place growing up not really knowing her true parentage, and always being told, Well, one day you'll look biracial. Don't worry about it right now, one day you'll change. But she didn't. Fauna, meanwhile, is named by Jimmy as Patricia Ann, and she's called patty. And I guess Patty was kind of almost like a bit of a slur for a white person, like, oh, that's patty. It's kind of like almost an inside joke. But later on, fauna learns that her mother, her biological mother, was a woman named Tamar Hodel. So of course, what happens? She tracks Tamar down to Hawaii, and she wants to have a reunion like I want to know where I came from. I want to know who my birth father is. I just want to know everything about my family of origin possible. And that was an experience. She goes out to Hawaii, and evidently, Tamar leaves her at the airport for hours. It's like she's expecting to be picked up in a timely fashion by her birth mother. And Tamar just leaves fauna at the airport for hours, like four or five hours wondering and having a panic attack about, well, did she change her mind? Are we going to have to am I going to have to turn around and leave because she's not going to come see me? But eventually, tomorrow shows up, and they hug and they cry and they sob, and then, all during this visit to Hawaii, there's talking about tomorrow's past, the past of the family, and tamar's past in particular, and George Hodel, and that's when fauna really realizes it's almost like, oh, shit, what have I gotten myself into? Because I'm finding out things that I never, ever, ever would have imagined. You may remember that the very first episode that I released on this podcast was about Dave McGowan's book, weird scenes inside the canyon, Laurel Canyon, covert ops and the dark heart of the hippie dream, where he makes the contention that the 1960s counter culture and anti war and make love, not war and the hippies and the movies and the music. All of this that supposedly sprang up organically in and around Hollywood was not organic. After all. It was manipulated and engineered for one thing, for the appearance of opposition, for controlled opposition, and so forth. It's also interesting that Tamar Hodel is mentioned in weird scenes inside the canyon because of her relationship to John and Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas. But I will get there. If the name Tamar hotel sounds familiar to you, that could be. Why. If you've read that book, then you may remember hearing about her, and it's like, yet again, we have more people that are in this Laurel Canyon scene that are connected to some weird, fucked up shit, and I trying to even describe tamar's Life is super tough, because One of the things that I think is difficult about this situation is that somebody like Tamar is both a victim and a perpetrator, and I think that's also one of the things that is difficult with some of the things that occurred with the Epstein cases like I remember watching this documentary about the kind of stuff that Epstein was doing in Florida. And there were girls now women, who were talking about how Epstein recruited them in high school, and then he, in turn, it was like he had his own screwed up MLM or pyramid scheme of underaged girls. So he would like recruit these girls out of high school to come and do sexual favors for him and jizz lane, or however she says it, and then they would get paid. It was like, Okay, if you want us to stop abusing you, then you have to bring us fresh meat. We're going to continue doing these things to you, unless you bring in new people, if you bring in new recruits, then we'll abuse the new recruits instead of abusing you. And we'll pay you. We will pay you a finder's fee for every teenage girl that you bring over here for us to abuse and some of them did it. I'm just like, oh my god, you know, like, I I struggle with that. Y'all I really do. Because I'm like, get the fuck away from those people. You don't take money in order to get other girls abused. Like, you know what's going to be done to them? And I have those kinds of emotions about Tamar, because awful things were done to her that should never, ever, ever, ever be done to anyone. And then she goes and does similar things to other kids, and it's like, Oh God, this is so bad. This is so so bad, so very bad, and so difficult to emotionally process. So I can only imagine what must have been going through fauna hotels. Mind when she starts finding out about this bizarre family tree that previously she had no knowledge of. She didn't really know what was going on here, and Tamara starts talking about her father, who was a man named George Hodel George. So let's, let's drop in a little bit before we even get to all the things going on with tomorrow, let's drop in on George's life for a little spell here. George was a doctor, and he was, you may remember, a suspect in the murder of Elizabeth short. To my knowledge, he was never formally charged with the crime, but there was a time when he was considered a suspect, and there are members of the Hodel family today, I'm not going to say all of them, but there are members of the Hodel family today that truly believe that he was guilty. George was born on October 10, 1907, and raised in Los Angeles. He was apparently a musical prodigy from an early age. He was like this insanely talented pianist, and he would tell his mother that he wanted to go outside and play. He wanted to, like rough house and throw the ball around with other boys in the neighborhood, and she did not want him to do that because she would scare, was scared that he would damage his hands or his fingers. It's kind of like you're this musical genius and you're this concert level pianist who's only a kid. This is an amazing gift. Don't screw it up. Don't go out there and break a hand or break a finger and ruin your career prospects. Here is some famous pianist, and he resented it. And evidently, after his mother died, he just said, the hell with this. I was never really interested in being a musical prodigy. Just because I could play the piano that well, doesn't mean I wanted to. I wanted to go out and have a different kind of childhood. Evidently, also when he was. Young. He was sent to Paris to enroll in some kind of, I guess, early version of a Montessori school. He comes back. He goes to South Pasadena High School. He graduates early, at like 15. So we're getting kind of a Doogie Howser thing going here, right? Like, kid, Kid genius, who graduates early. He enrolls in Cal Tech, but there's a scandal, like, oh, this. This shit starting early. He was forced to leave the university after only, like, one year, so maybe, like, his freshman year. And also, at this point he's still underage guys. He has a sex scandal because he has an affair with a professor's wife, and it's like, okay, so again, we've got trauma, we've got super problematic behavior, because you're talking about a boy who's like, 16. Maybe we could push it and say he was 17 at this point in time, but a boy who's under the age of 18 having sex with a grown adult woman and gets her pregnant. And this woman gives birth somewhere around 1926 to a baby that's named folly, F, O, L, L, Y, and supposedly, she picks that name for this child because she's like, Oh, what a folly, what a farce, what a silly thing we did. George offers to, I guess, try to be a stand up guy, like, hey, I want to help you raise this baby. I know that I knocked you up, and I don't want to just run off. I care about you, and now we have this kid. And the woman's like, oh, fuck off. Like, no, that's not going to happen. You're still a baby yourself. Like, we had this affair, we had this fun, we had this baby out of it, and that's cool, or whatever, but leave. And so here we go. There's more trauma. Like, let's just put as much trauma into this situation as possible. An underage, inappropriate relationship gets kicked out of school, has a child by someone who's married to someone else, and then offers to raise that child and gets told not, you beat it. Wow, wow, wow.

Around 1928 George is in a common law marriage with a woman named Emilia, and they have a son by the 1930s he gets legally married to another woman named Dorothy Anthony, who, I guess was some kind of like fashion model, or clothing model from California. This is important, because that Dorothy, there's going to be another Dorothy. Because, to keep this really fucking confusing, there's going to be another Dorothy. Dorothy, Anthony, the model from California, is the mother of Tamar around 1932 George Odell graduates from Berkeley pre med. After that, he goes to medical school at the University of California in San Francisco. And then he graduates with his MD In the summer of 1936 he has like a medical practice, and he works his way up to becoming the head honcho in the quote, unquote, social hygiene bureau. Wink. And back then that was, like a code is sort of like, you know, back when Hollywood had its morality standards and its censorship laws and all of that, like the social hygiene Bureau is actually code for venereal disease. We think about it now, and it almost sounds laughable, but when you're thinking about back in the day before the discovery and then the prevalence of antibiotics. Venereal disease was more common and it was also more difficult to treat. So in some respects it was, it was almost like a miniature epidemic, at times in major cities for people to be infected with sexually transmitted diseases and infections, so someone who knows how to treat them and then also is willing to keep that information quiet and not ruin your public reputation, that person has a lot of power. And so we're told that Hodel George hotel becomes like the public hygiene or the venereal disease Sara of LA County, and he's moving in a lot of important circles with important people, movers and shakers, people that have money, people that are more than willing to slip him some extra money to keep it quiet that they've been diagnosed with venereal disease. It's also important to note at this point that George sees a money making opportunity, and so there are times when he falsifies medical records. In other words, he will tell somebody in a. Prominent position that they have venereal disease, but they don't. He'll lie and falsify the results because he wants that person to be indebted. He's wanting to milk them for money or for favors or for power or prestige, or he just wants to be able to blackmail them later, like I did this favor by giving you medication and keeping your condition quiet. I didn't tell your wife, I didn't report it. So you owe me now there was very much this sense of, I'm going to create this information, this false information, about your health, so I can use it to manipulate you later, keep that information in mind, because it will become relevant. George splits up with this woman, Dorothy Anthony, and he winds up marrying another woman named Dorothy. I guess he really liked that name. Guess he had a thing for women with that name. But somewhere around 1940 George hodell marries Dorothy Harvey. But Dorothy Harvey is also, by the way, John Houston's ex wife. John Houston, you may remember, was a famous film director and actor. He will also become relevant to this situation before I conclude this episode. Just, just keep that in mind, like George is marrying Dorothy. Harvey, the ex wife of director John Houston and George, gives Dorothy number two the nickname derao, to help separate her from Dorothy number one, because Dorothy number one is still at least vaguely in the picture, because she's the ex wife and they have this kid, Tamar together. So it's instead of Dorothy one and Dorothy two, it's basically Dorothy Anthony and Torero. Now we're told in the root of evil podcast that George made that up not only as like a portmanteau that involves Dorothy, but also arrows, kind of like combining Dorothy and Eros, the God of love, together in this nickname. Make of that what you will so Hodel purchases in 1945 this place called the Soden house. It's also called the Franklin house because it was built in 1926 by Lloyd Wright, who was the son of the famous architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, and I think it's a considered to be an historic landmark in LA but even though George is married to Dora, oh, it's not like they have a typical marriage, not by sort of Midwestern white bread standards. Okay? It's not like they only sleep with each other. We're told, in the root of evil podcast, that gerara was openly bisexual and that George was like, cheating on her, and they were having group sex with each other, and it was like catch as catch can as far as sex and sexual encounters went Steve one of George hotel's sons, tells the story in the root of evil podcast, that there were times that George would put Steve and his brother Kelly in the Jeep that he had, And he would go out on these house calls. But they weren't really house calls in any medical sense, because Steve started to notice that George would leave his medical bag in the Jeep, and he would tell the kids like, sit down and don't cause any trouble, and do not get out of this vehicle. Just sit down, shut up and amuse yourselves in the jeep. And they liked writing in the jeep. They thought it was cool, and they also liked the attention from their dad. But obviously they would get bored, because Steve was like, there were times that we would sit in that damn Jeep for hours. It might be two or three hours before he came out, and I started to notice that he wasn't even carrying his medical bag. And I thought it was weird, but as a kid, I didn't have the full understanding of what was really going on. We said, looking back on it, as an adult, I know what was going on. He was going and having sex with these women. And Steve told a disturbing story about a time when one of the Mistresses came out of the house and she was looking at the boys like they were pets. And she started to talk to Steve and be like, Oh, he's cute. Can I keep him? And George was like, No, not this time. I think I'll keep him instead. And they were laughing and kind of canoodling with one another at the jeep. And it's like, wow. So George in in the midst of being married to Dora, oh, he's going out and having sexual house calls with various women around LA and is taking kids, putting kids in the Jeep, and having them sit outside at the curb while he goes in and gets some Nookie in the middle of the afternoon. I mean, even that, even if we just stopped here, this would be enough for us to be like. Holy shit, this is some fucked up mess, but we're really only on the tip of the iceberg. In the 1940s around the time that Elizabeth short is murdered, there's like, some kind of weird i don't even know what you would call it. It's not really polygamy, in the sense that everybody's married. There's a there's a word for it, and I've just lost it. It's not even open marriage. It's more like, just almost like a commune of sex, because they're all of these people living in the house together around the time that Elizabeth short was murdered. So you've got George living with jerero and three of the kids that they would have. I think it's maybe useful to look at the family tree real quick. So George by the first, Dorothy has Tamar. George by the second, Dorothy, who gets nicknamed jerero, has four kids, Michael, John, Steven and George, and one of those kids, I think, has the nickname Kelly. I'm not sure. Why? Don't ask me. I don't know. But around the time of this murder, you've got all these people are kind of living together, so you have George and jerero, and then three of the four kids that they would have. But then also Dorothy, Anthony. Dorothy. Dorothy number one is there. Tamar is there. And at times, the first common law wife named Emilia was around also. And the kid that they had together was an adult by that time. And sometimes that child as an adult was around, and then on top of that, he would have lovers in and out. And again, as I said, sometimes it was just George and this other woman, sometimes it would be group sex, and sometimes it would be swinging, you know, where you have other couples and everybody's going to trade off and all have sex with each other, a wild situation, indeed, probably tame, you know, group sex like that, tame by Hollywood standards. But you know, once you start getting into murder and torture, it's like, well, wait a minute, wait, wait, wait a minute. Remember, I told you that George was manipulating medical records. He was telling prominent people that they had VD at times when they didn't because he wanted to manipulate them. Well, that's going to become relevant again. He had a secretary named Ruth Spalding, and Ruth figured out what was going on, and she was going to out him. She knew what he was doing. She knew that he had this little black males scheme that he was running, and she was going to out him. And in fact, something else that we learned in root of evil is that she had one or two manuscripts. She had some, like, typewritten pages where she was thinking about publishing a book, trying to put together a screenplay, or something, like she was going to really blow the whistle on George, he finds out and allegedly murders her. Now, officially, we're told it's a suicide wink. But apparently Ruth, like goes to the apartment, goes to her apartment and overdoses on barbiturates. George is there conveniently, and he lets her go just long enough to be sure that she'll be dead, that she won't be able to survive the overdose, and then he calls for help. She gets to the hospital and dies shortly thereafter. And he also gets derero involved by saying, like we there are some papers here, confidential papers that she has in her apartment, and we need to burn them, things that pertain to me and my business, it's not anything that needs to be rifled through by other people so they burn documents. Are we ever going to know exactly what this lady Ruth Spalding was planning to write? Are we ever going to know exactly how much she knew? Unfortunately, we won't. But it was it enough to kill for Evidently, it was, and that, in and of itself, is very scary. Tamar is I'm trying to think of how to say it, an unusual child, shall we say? Steve, in the podcast root of evil talks about how there were times when Tamar would take all of her clothes off, and she would go out in the yard, like public, public nudity and underage, too, by the way, and stand very, very still and pretend to be a statue. And then whenever people would look at her, then she would move to scare them. And I just remember thinking like, Well, that certainly sounds like a very odd hobby for someone to have. So bear in mind that Tamar is living in the house at a time where there's a lot of sex, a lot of inappropriate behavior going on. And. And I find it very hard to believe that that inappropriate behavior wasn't displayed in front of the children. We get plenty of evidence from root of evil that it most certainly involved the children, and at times, was certainly paraded around for Tamar to be able to see what was going on. Tamar claims that the photographer, the surrealist photographer, Man Ray, took photographs of her, naked, photographs of her when she was only 12, which is highly, highly disturbing. It's also worth mentioning at this point in the podcast that George hodell had a strong interest in surrealist art, we get a bit of a trope, sort of a similar thing to what we're often told about Adolf Hitler, in terms of the frustrated artist who can't make it and so turns into a homicidal maniac. We're told the same thing about George hotel, that he had this strong interest in surrealist art, but he wasn't an artist himself, or he didn't think that he could be a successful artist. So he's this frustrated surrealist who is very close friends with Man Ray. In the root of evil podcast, there are accusations that Man Ray and his wife, Juliet, were involved intimately with George and jerero in the in a group sex situation. I have no idea if that accusation is true, to be clear, but it's thrown out there. Let's put it that way. We have the horrific murder of Elizabeth short, the so labeled Black Dahlia. She's the body is found in January of 1947 I don't want to belabor that point too much, since I talked about the crime scene in the last episode, but the body is bisected. There's suspicion that it had to have been somebody with medical knowledge because of the way that it was done. There are also certain poses that the body is in. There's the comparison that the way that Elizabeth's torso is arranged. It's arranged to look like a famous Man Ray photograph of the Minotaur. So one theory that's posited in root of evil is that George Hodel did the murder and then arranged the corpse in such a way to show like this is real life surrealist art. I don't just photograph it. I don't just put it on a canvas or sculpt something. I've brought it into real life. I am now the ultimate surrealist artist because I've done this. Is that true? I don't know. It's one theory of what was going on in his warped fucking mind that he decided to do this

In late 1949 there's a so called morality trial again. This is, you know, censoring flowery kind of language to cover up what was really going on, which was a trial about incest. Tamar came forward, she was like 14, and said that George had repeatedly abused her and raped her, and the rape resulted in a pregnancy, and then he forced her to go get, like a back alley abortion from somebody he knew that would do the job. If you have a resource like newspapers.com you can go through and look at at least a few of the articles that were published in the Los Angeles press at that time. So the accusation is that George had been abusing, molesting and then raping Tamar, I think, starting when she was like 11 or 12, and then culminating in this rape that happened when she was like 14, and caused her to get pregnant. The defense, of course, decides to try to tear her apart like nobody is going to believe her. If we can portray her as a liar and a dirty girl, a bad girl, someone who's already having sex with other people and she's nasty. So if we can defame her and make her sound terrible, then nobody will believe her accusations. Anyway, they get a high profile defense attorney and they go on the offensive towards Tamar, a pretty aggressive smear campaign about what a terrible person that Tamar was. There are some people who were initially willing to vouch for Tamar and say that, yes, they had seen unspoken horrors in that house, but they start recanting their statements. They say that, well, I was perjuring myself before when I was on tamar's side, but I'm not perjuring myself now. And essentially what happens is in this so called morality trial. Oh, the character assassination of Tamar works. And I think the trial only lasted, like three weeks. I don't even think it lasted a month, and then George Odell was found to be not guilty. Surprise, surprise, somebody with friends in high places and plenty of blackmail material gets found not guilty. And then the victim in all of it is also the victim of the smear campaign. So after this acquittal, Tamar becomes estranged from the family, and people look at her as being a liar like you. You are the ultimate liar, because you probably got pregnant by somebody else, had a back alley abortion. Your dad found out about it and confronted you, and so you decided to make up this terrible lie to slander him all over town. You know that that's going to have an impact. So it's like yet again, this is more trauma on top of trauma on top of trauma, and a very, very sad and awful thing during the investigation for the incest trial, Tamar mentioned that she thought her father may have been involved in the murder of Elizabeth short, may have been her killer. The police put bugs and taps around the house. They wire tapped the phones and they put bugs in the home, and that also turned up some very disturbing material, like he had some friend called the Baron who was a German, and they had some weird conversations, which, again, it's like, Why do we always see people who seem like they could be Nazis or Nazi adjacent? Is that fucking disturbing? I'm telling y'all. Nazi ideology is one of the most poisonous goddamn things I have ever seen in my life. It is so disturbing. There are transcripts from the wiretaps, evidently, as we later learned from Steve Odell, the original wiretap audio has been destroyed, but the transcripts still exist. That's a whole nother story. Okay, I'll try to get there. But on the wire taps, George Odell is caught saying things like, supposing I did kill the Black Dahlia. They couldn't prove it. Now they can't talk to my secretary because she's dead. He might have beat the charges for the incest trial by making Tamar sound like a pathological liar, but he has absolutely said some incriminating things on the wiretap as well as weird things happening, like sounds. There's some audio that gets played in, I guess, like a reenactment type of thing, you know, in the podcast, but it's basically the sound of, like, beating somebody being beaten and a woman screaming. So then it's like, well, do the cops have a recording, or did they have a recording of George murdering somebody in the basement and then burying her body down there? But that's That's horrific, like, what all did he do? How much? How much do we still not know? That's just completely and totally disturbing. So Tamar becomes pregnant, allegedly by a man of color, and decides that, well, she doesn't really decide it's like her mother decides for her that she doesn't need to try to raise the baby.

We're not told exactly who Tamar actually is pregnant by. We were told that she had a friend who was African American, and they might have been having sex, so it's sort of like we're going to blame that guy? And then in August of 1951 out comes fauna hotel with strawberry blonde hair and blue eyes. It's like, wait, wait a minute. I think that there may be some things that are not completely honest in this situation. I think somebody may be fibbing. Tamar gets in with some of the Laurel Canyon people and some of the Hollywood scene. As I mentioned, if you've read weird scenes inside the canyon, then you may already know that when Tamar is like 23 she be friends Michelle Phillips, who I think was only like 16 at the time, Tamar also has another child, and this child is named Deborah Elizabeth. And whenever Deborah is little, it's like Tamar has already befriended Michelle Phillips, and there's some agreement, like Tamar decides that she is going to try to commit suicide. And so she gets like, 40 or 52nd all tablets to do it, and she tells Michelle, after I've died, I want you to adopt Deborah and be her mother. And Deborah looks back on this and the root of evil podcast and says I was actually okay with Michelle raising me, because I felt like Michelle would be more of a mother to me than my own. Mother was, however, during this suicide attempt, somebody chickens out some something goes awry. It's not really clear in the podcast what happens, but an ambulance gets called. Tomorrow's stomach is pumped. They get enough of the medication out, and they say, like you called us in the nick of time. You know she could have died otherwise, so she survives the suicide attempt, and Michelle Phillips winds up not adopting Deborah. Elizabeth, Deborah, in the podcast, describes her life as being pretty much a living hell. Her mother, not loving her, not taking good care of her, and she wanted the acceptance and love of her mother, but she just doesn't get it. Instead, tomorrow, we'll have these benders where she talks about fauna, fauna the baby I gave away. Where is she? What is her life like? I wish I had her. And so Deborah actually asks to be called fauna instead of Deborah like, maybe if I become fauna, then you'll love me. Maybe you'll pay attention to me. If I become the fauna that went away, the fauna that got away. So she begins calling herself fauna. And then later, when fauna number one comes into the picture, it makes it difficult for fauna number two, because they wind up feeling a little bit weird about each other because fauna number one shows up and this other half sibling has taken her name. So there's some weird tension there that happens later. And very, very odd. Tamar, living in Hawaii, has several other kids, and she picks unusual hippie names like peace on earth, Joy to the world and love. So she's these three boys. They're like, peace, joy and love, and they're living in Hawaii, and they, in the podcast, describe their lives as being totally bizarre. Lot of marijuana and drug use openly, a lot of sex and sexuality openly on display. One of the boys, I don't remember which one, but one of them described a situation where he was sleeping over at some friend of tamar's house, and the man, like crept up in the night and tried to take his pants off, but he woke up and he screamed, and so the man went away. But they're pretty clear in saying that they feel that their mother sold them, essentially made them sex slaves so that other people could molest them and do things to them for money. Like, as long as they were giving money to Tamar, she would allow strangers, male and female, they said, to molest them and hurt them. And that is just horrendous. So it's like we have Tamar, who starts out as a victim, and then also later, allegedly, according to this, to this information in the podcast, becomes a perpetrator herself. The boys also, Steve and Kelly also tell stories about Tamar touching them inappropriately. And in fact, Steve goes so far in root of evil podcast as to say that Tamar, later in life, alleged to him that apparently they didn't talk for a long time, but after George's death, they reconnected, and she said, I'm sorry about the sex thing. And he's like, about what sex thing? It's almost like, you more specific than that in this family, like, what's sex thing? And she's like, well, the time that we had sex. And he's like, I don't remember that happening. She's like, Well, it happened. I was 13 and you were eight, and we had full on intercourse, and I'm sorry that I did that to you. And Steve was like, I don't have any memory of it happening. I could have repressed it, or maybe she's misremembering, but, you know, I don't know. It's like, well, that's horrifying too. Just a lot, a lot of horrifying information taking place in this podcast. So as I mentioned, George is caught on this wiretap, almost being braggadocious, like, well, supposing I did kill the Black Dahlia. They can't prove it. They don't have any evidence. My secretary's dead, so they can't ask her. Haha. He flees the country. Now, around this time, like 1950 he and Dora, oh, split up, and he winds up marrying another lady, I think, in the Philippines, maybe. But the point is, he flees the country. He gets the hell out of dodge, because he's like, okay, Tamar has blown the whistle and said that I might be The Black Dahlia killer. And then they had this wire tap, and they had bugs in the house. Who knows what all they might have caught on tape. I need to just get out of here. So he leaves, and then he starts a whole other family, a whole ass other family in this other country. So he marries this woman, I think, named Laguna, and they have, like, four other children. So is it like I said, he goes off and has this whole other life after he's fled the scene in LA there has. Also been some information that has come forth that not only is he a potential suspect in the Black Dahlia Murder, but he was also interviewed as a suspect in this thing called the Green twig murder of a woman who was killed in June of 1949 and her name was Louise Springer, so in October of 1949 hodel's name was mentioned in a formal report to a grand jury that he was one of five prime suspects in Elizabeth Short's murder, but none of the name suspects submitted to The grand jury for consideration was formally indicted, because at that point the investigation was still going on again. Hodel gets the hell out of dodge. He moves on to the Philippines. He gets married to another woman. He starts a new family later on, though, somewhere around the early 90s, he comes back to San Francisco. It was back to California, and lives in San Francisco, and he decides to commit suicide. I believe in 1999 he writes he's still a doctor. So he writes enough prescription medication, prescriptions for himself to get enough medication to commit suicide. Like, I'm I'm sick. I think he had maybe congestive heart failure or something, but he's like, I'm sick and I want to go out on my own terms. So he has an overdose and dies. And then that's when a lot of the family, the extended family, starts coming together to try to figure out, well, who was he? And Steve in the podcast, says that he's conflicted, because it's like after George came back to California later in life, the two of them reconciled a bit and started trying to have a good relationship. So when Steve, who, by the way, becomes an LAPD homicide detective, imagine that when Steve gets interested in the Black Dahlia Murder, and more and more, he sees evidence that makes him think that, yes, George hodell very well could have been the killer of Elizabeth short. He gets freaked out and he's like, Well, there's part of me that loves the man because he gave he gave me life. I'm here because of his existence. But then at the same time, I'm really highly disturbed by all of this, because if he, if he was The Black Dahlia killer, then people should know, and justice should be done. This poor woman suffered terribly, and we shouldn't just cover it up. Now, in the root of evil podcast, Steve says that whenever Tamar was initially telling him about all of this, like, well, you know, he was a suspect, right? He was kind of like, I don't trust this information. So he he says anyway, that he went out with the intention of proving that George couldn't possibly have been the killer, but all he found was evidence suggesting that George probably was the murderer of Elizabeth short. I don't know, you know, we've, we've kind of been through that trope before that somebody starts out really liking somebody, and then they get into the real material and find out the person is a bastard. We've certainly heard that with JFK mythology before. Well, I was going to write a flattering biography, but then I found out that the Kennedys are terrible, and so I had to write a hit piece instead. And it's like, I don't know about that. I'm always highly suspicious. So take that for what it's worth. You know, did Steve go into it originally thinking he was going to exonerate his dad? I don't know, but the point is now he feels differently about it. Steve says that he has some DNA that he was able to get from an envelope, and there was DNA found on some of the letters. You may remember in the last episode I talked about, there were some letters sent to the police almost tauntingly. And Steve said that he got, he got this DNA, paid for it at his own expense to make sure that a legitimate DNA laboratory had a good DNA sample from George Odell. And he went to LAPD like, Please test the DNA, see if it's a match, and he was not able to get anybody to do it. It's one of those things like, yeah, technically, the case is still open. It's technically, like, this unsolved cold case, and we haven't given up on it. But at the same time, do the taxpayers of La really want to pay for it? I mean, probably not. So he he feels that he really got the run around from the police on trying to actually get the DNA tested. You may remember that I mentioned John, Houston could potentially be relevant again in this episode, so we know that George married. Dorothy, Harvey, aka derero, aka John Houston's ex wife. Here's something interesting, and I really ought to do my own separate episode about the movie. But you may remember that John Houston was involved in the film Chinatown. Spoiler alert here, if you haven't seen it, you know, I certainly don't want to ruin it for you. But the big twist ending in that movie is that Faye dunaway's character, who is supposedly raising a sister, well, it's her sister, but it's also her daughter, because this child is the product of incest. Is it a coincidence that John Houston was involved in that movie? I don't know, because there certainly have been rumors that Chinatown was based on the hotel family, at least that part of it, that this woman who's supposedly raising her sister is actually raising her daughter because her own father raped her, got her pregnant. She had the baby, and now the baby is both her sister and her daughter at the same time. Super disturbing. But again, is it completely in the realm of fiction? No, no, it isn't. Not in this case. Anyway, fauna always wondered about who was her birth father, because it was obvious that it was not an African American man. So who was it really? She expressed to her own daughters, rasha and Yvette, who are the narrators, primarily of the podcast, that she was almost scared to know. There was almost this sense of fear that Tamar, at some point, was going to confess that George was both her father and her grandfather at the same time, and she wasn't really sure that she wanted to handle that information. One of the daughters says that Tamar vehemently denied to her that George was fauna's real father. The other one says that she never vehemently denied it. Judge for yourself, but there certainly has always been at least the whisper that fauna's real father could have been George, and that may have been one of the reasons why tamar's own mother was so adamant that she needed to get rid of the baby. It's like, we're going to say that the baby's biracial. We're going to say that, you know, you can't raise a baby like that because you're still young and there's all this prejudice. But really, we could be taking a baby that's the product of incest and dropping it off on an African American woman under the lie that it was actually a biracial child. Wow. So we know that George is disturbed and deranged. We know that he was doing some very unsavory things, including lying to people, saying they had VD when they didn't, manipulating them, blackmailing them and so forth. It appears pretty solid that he was involved in some way in the death of his secretary, excuse me, the suicide wink of his secretary, and was involved in burning papers to make sure that whatever she knew did not become public. There was the morality trial. Tamar says that he abused her and raped her and got her pregnant. If you listen to the root of evil podcast, there's also a lot of disturbing information, where Tamar talks about, in graphic detail the types of things that they did, the types of things that went on at the house, and how her father would trick her into doing things sexually to Him and for Him, just really sickening things. So is it possible that George was involved. I certainly think it's possible that he was involved. I can't sit here and definitively tell you that George Odell is The Black Dahlia murderer, I would say, based on what I have read and based on what I have heard, I certainly would not be surprised. I at this point, would be more surprised if he wasn't involved than if he was involved. I mean, why would you say something like that on a wire tap and then flee the country? I mean, he must have thought that all of his connections wouldn't be strong enough to get him off again. If he really was indicted for the Black Dahlia Murder, I would only tell you to listen to the root of evil podcast if you're certain that you can stomach it. If you're certain that it's something that you can handle it is full of bizarre information and highly disturbing information, highly, highly, highly disturbing and traumatic information, and it just sounds to me like George, whatever the source of his trauma was, whatever, whatever kind of made him the way that he was, whatever wiring was faulty there, I don't know, but he was this musical prodigy, but also some kind of genius. I guess an early IQ test tested him at like 186 so he wasn't just a genius. He was like an intense genius, a very high level, high IQ individual. Then at the same time, he becomes obsessed with surrealist art, and instead of admiring the paintings or the photographs. Is it possible that, whether it was to impress Man Ray, or whether it was to make his own mark on surrealist art, is it possible that he murdered Elizabeth short as a sort of real life surrealist piece? Was he murdering other women, the thumping and the beating and the screaming that the LAPD caught on audio? Is it possible that he murdered somebody else in the basement?

So very, very, very disturbing. I wish that I had a definitive answer for you, but I don't. The most I can say is what I've already said. I would be more surprised if he wasn't involved, as opposed to being surprised that he was involved. I certainly wish that they would run the DNA test that Steve was talking about, because, yes, even though this murder is decades old, just saying, I don't think the taxpayers care, forget about it. That's way too thin of an excuse. Is it ever too late to know the truth? Is it ever too late for justice? He can't go to jail now, obviously he's gone, long gone. But people, people could know the truth. We could, we could at least be closer to a sense of closure, not only for the general public, but for members of Elizabeth's family that are still alive, just a point to ponder. Stay a little bit crazy, and I will see you in the next episode.

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