A retired LAPD detective now says his own father was both the Black Dahlia killer and the Zodiac, after 27 years of digging and a new book pressing agencies to test the DNA.
Steve Hodel is 85, lives in Birch Bay, Washington, and spent a career solving murders for the Los Angeles Police Department. He says he closed more than 300 homicide cases at an 80 percent rate. Then his father died in 1999, a relative mentioned the old man had once been questioned in the Black Dahlia case, and the son set out to clear the family name.
What he says he found instead is a trail that runs from a vacant Los Angeles lot in 1947 to Northern California’s Zodiac terror, and beyond. In a new book, The Black Dahlia Murder: Fact vs. Fiction, shared with The US Sun, Hodel argues that his late father, Dr. George Hill Hodel, killed Elizabeth Short, wrote the Zodiac taunts, and may have left as many as 50 victims across five decades.
No agency has announced charges. No court has ruled on the claim. Hodel is asking readers and police to weigh the documents he has gathered, not take his word on faith.
George Hill Hodel died at 91. He had been billed as a child prodigy with an IQ of 186, entered university at 14, worked as a teenage crime reporter, and later practiced medicine. The family home was the Sowden House in Los Angeles, a place Hodel says hosted Hollywood parties and, later, police microphones.
Steve Hodel has said he loved the man who raised him. He also says the evidence forced a darker conclusion.
“I began that investigation not only as a detective, but as a son who loved his father,” he said. “My goal was to establish his innocence. I was confident I could and would do that. A month or two of searching, I thought I would have my answers and move on.”
That short search, he now says, became 312 months and counting.
“That ‘month or two’ has now become 312 months, and counting. What the son hoped for was not to be. Why? Because the detective [in me] did what he had been trained to do. He followed the evidence.”
He frames the father he is accusing in blunt terms.
“I liken him to a wild beast,” he said. “Let’s say, a man-eating tiger loose in a village... George was not captured and kept killing.”
“This man had so much potential; he could have cured cancer, he could have done so much good for humanity and he, in fact, became one of the world’s worst monsters.”
Fox News reported that Elizabeth Short’s mutilated, bisected body was found in a Los Angeles vacant lot on January 15, 1947. She was 22. The remains were drained of blood, the right breast removed, the body covered in cigarette burns, the mouth slashed, and the corpse posed on paper cement sacks.
Steve Hodel says those sacks had been purchased four days earlier for the Hodel family home. He also says he later found photographs among his father’s belongings that he believed showed Short.
Central to his case is surgical skill. He cites UCSF medical school transcripts he says show George Hodel completed 766 hours of surgical training, personally performed 53 operations, and conducted 12 autopsies. He argues the clean bisection through the lower lumbar spine, without sawing bone, matched a standard autopsy method taught in the 1930s, a hemicorporectomy-style cut that ordinary street killers would not know how to perform.
Hodel also works to strip away myths about the victim. He says surviving LAPD, district attorney, and coroner records give no evidence she was a prostitute, drug user, alcoholic, or “sexually abnormal.”
“She was a lost and emotionally vulnerable 22-year-old searching for ‘Lieutenant Right’, a military officer with whom she could fall in love, marry, establish a home, and live happily ever after.”
“Those who knew Elizabeth described her as immaculately dressed, shy, sweet, well behaved and a good kid.”
Hodel points to a 1950 LAPD bugging operation in which he says 18 detectives monitored the mansion. On those recordings, he says, his father spoke about the Dahlia case and a dead secretary, Ruth Spaulding, who had died of a drug overdose.
“Supposing I did kill the Black Dahlia. They can’t prove it now. My secretary is dead,”
the voice on the tape said, as Hodel presents it.
He also cites a sealed three-page letter he attributes to LAPD undercover informant W. Glenn Martin, dated October 1949, with an envelope marked for use “In case of Margaret Ellen’s or Glenna Jean’s Death.” In Hodel’s account, Martin named “G.H.” as the Black Dahlia killer and wrote that police had questioned Hodel about both the Dahlia murder and the 1949 slaying of Louise Springer, then “became G.H.’s friend so matter dropped.”
Another document he highlights is a typed 1950 district attorney witness statement from Mattie Comfort. Hodel says it originally stated she “was with Doctor Hodel sometime prior to the murder and that she knew about his being associated with victim”, and that an unknown person later penciled in the word “nothing,” so the line read that she “knew nothing about” the association.
Handwriting examiners in blind comparisons, he says, found it “highly probable” that George Hodel authored both Black Dahlia taunt notes and Zodiac cryptograms. Hodel also says he extracted his father’s full DNA profile from old letters and published it openly, urging labs to compare it to crime-scene material.
Hodel does not stop at one murder. He ties his father to what he calls the Black Dahlia Avenger series, 16 brutal killings of women in Los Angeles between 1943 and 1950, including Ora Murray, Georgette Bauerdorf, Jeanne French, and Louise Springer. Jeanne French’s body, he notes, was found posed with “F*** YOU, B.D.” written in lipstick on the torso. He also flags geographic taunts: Short posed off Degnan Boulevard after the 1946 Chicago murder of six-year-old Suzanne Degnan, whose body was surgically dismembered; French dumped off Mountain View Avenue, where he says Elizabeth was buried.
He extends the map overseas. In May 1967, he says, Lucila Lalu was surgically bisected in Manila less than a mile from a Hodel family residence and posed next to Zodiac Street. He believes his father’s violence began with the shooting of a San Francisco priest when George was 14 and ended with cabdriver Paul Stine, the last named Zodiac victim, in 1969.
The Zodiac murdered seven people Hodel lists by name: Betty Lou Jensen, David Faraday, Darlene Ferrin, Cecelia Shepard, Bryan Hartnell, and Paul Stine, among the Bay Area dead. Hodel claims 32 distinct “crime signatures” link the Black Dahlia Avenger killings to the Zodiac’s coded letters and crime scenes. He is already at work on a follow-up book, The Zodiac Murders: Fact vs. Fiction.
“What began as an investigation into a single murder expanded into something neither the son nor the detective could have imagined,” he said. “Witnesses came forward from long ago. Door after door opened, new clues appeared. New links to old crimes emerged.”
Steve Hodel is not the only family member who has gone public. The New York Post reported that descendants including Yvette Gentile and Rasha Pecoraro have said they are convinced George Hill Hodel killed Elizabeth Short, citing the same surgical cut, handwriting matches, house bugs, and the family’s own reckoning through a podcast, Root of Evil, and the TNT series I Am the Night.
“I one hundred million percent believe that George Hodel killed Elizabeth Short,” Rasha Pecoraro said.
Yvette Gentile put it more simply: “This was some evil, evil stuff.”
Steve Hodel has described the same split up close. He has said he still loves the father who created him, while rejecting what he calls the “monster” side. That tension does not settle the forensics. It does explain why a retired detective spent a quarter-century on a case that began at his own dinner table.
Hodel’s public ask is not a press tour victory lap. He wants multi-agency work on hard evidence.
“I would like law enforcement to put past disagreements to rest and follow the evidence wherever it leads.”
“The agencies should share their files, compare the evidence across jurisdictions and make every effort to obtain confirmed DNA and fingerprint evidence.”
“These cold case serial crimes will ultimately only be solved through hard physical evidence.”
He goes further on institutional habits that strand victims’ families:
“Law enforcement often says that investigators ‘stand in the shoes of the victims and never give up.’ In these cases, they need to prove that, not merely with words, but with deeds and action.”
“That cannot happen until the separate law-enforcement agencies end their territoriality put aside their egos and abandon the attitude that nobody else is going to solve ‘my case.’”
“These crimes crossed city, county, state and even national borders. The agencies need to join forces, share their evidence and work as one team.”
The best ending, he says, is official recognition and closure for the dead and the families left behind. His stated method for the books matches that demand: “I have not asked the reader to believe me. I have asked the reader to examine the evidence.” And: “My goal is the same: to strip away the accumulated myths and present the evidence as it was then and as it stands today.”
Cold cases do not solve themselves, and victims do not get quieter with time. If the files, the prints, and the DNA still exist, the public is right to expect police departments to compare them in the open, not guard turf while the dead wait.
