Episode 603: The Black Dahlia Murder Part IV - Exquisite Corpse

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Speaker 3 There's no place to escape to this is the last podcast. On the left.

Speaker 3 That's when the cannibalism started.

Speaker 3 Who's that?

Speaker 3 Wow, a lot of people wondered, would they ever record again?

Speaker 3 Would

Speaker 3 God

Speaker 3 stop Last Podcast on the left from happening due to one of his many myriad of mysteries and control of the elements? I think it's Los Angeles trying to keep a wrap.

Speaker 3 We gotta fucking tell people.

Speaker 3 You know what we gotta do? Honestly, we gotta move Larry Hartnish out of town. Yeah.
Because

Speaker 3 the fire is coming for Larry Harnish. Save Larry Hard.
Someone's gotta get the box of papers. He's got a box of papers.
He's got a book and my books. You can't be duplicated.

Speaker 3 Someone going to get the Black Dahlia papers.

Speaker 3 Sorry, Larry. We got to leave you behind.
Welcome to the Last Podcast on the Left, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Marcus Barks.
I'm here with the concerned Henry Zabrowski. Not flammable.

Speaker 3 Henry Zabrowski can't be set ablaze. We're doing okay.
Too well.

Speaker 3 All of my horses are safe. Yes.
My opaque farm is doing

Speaker 3 so well. Good, good, good.
I heard my butlers go. That was like the hardest part was letting them go.

Speaker 3 I went to the servants' quarters and I asked them, like, I do feel like you should burn alive with that house. And my, the head concierge of my foyer, he said, yes, sir, yes, I agree, sir.
But still,

Speaker 3 against my own better wishes, I let them go. Good.
And I've, you know, I'm almost thinking about like, I have a personal water reservoir and I'm thinking about maybe letting the city use it.

Speaker 3 But I think for now, I'm good to just keep it for my own baths. Yeah, because don't you, seriously, right? Because you're going to get that good water.

Speaker 3 What do I do with my natural well, my natural water source? I'm using most of that water to perfect my white, white rice recipe, which is extremely good. The whitest of all of rice.
White rice.

Speaker 3 Well, here we are in Los Angeles. The fires are going, and we're talking about Black Dahlia, part four.
Still.

Speaker 3 So now that we've covered our man, Leslie Dillon, whose story shows more than anything just what police corruption can do to a murder investigation. Leslie, leave her alone, alone, Leslie.

Speaker 3 Let's explore the worlds of two suspects who have nothing to do with the mob or the LAPD.

Speaker 3 These suspects are your old-fashioned Los Angeles characters, doctors, who are both their own little individual labyrinths of secrets and lies.

Speaker 3 There's something that gets added to, I think, when you're an LA doctor. Oh, yeah.
Like, like how mysteriously attractive your dentist is, Eddie. Oh,

Speaker 3 you know what I mean? Like, there's certain things you meet somebody in. LA is one of those places when you meet a doctor, you're almost like, well, because they're all actor wannabes.

Speaker 3 Or they all got a script. They all were like handsome, they were beautiful people.
My doctor has a better headshot than I do. Yeah, hey.
Like, it's really good.

Speaker 3 You've only been in town for a year plus. That's true.

Speaker 3 Now, our first spec is included here, not necessarily because we think he killed Elizabeth Short. He probably didn't.

Speaker 3 But he is included because he is absolutely fascinating with surprising connections to both Hollywood and the world of fine art.

Speaker 3 It's the character most people lead with in a Black Dahlia series, but we're not like that. Okay.
You fucking pieces of shit. We went through a more important theory.
All right.

Speaker 3 Now we're going to get to it because that's when we chose to do it. Right, Marcus? God damn right.
It's our fucking choice. That's right.
When we do what?

Speaker 3 Yeah, we'll put the most entertaining stuff in the end because that's where it belongs. As far as I'm concerned, why do you think they do Rosalita for 15 minutes at the very end of the show?

Speaker 3 Our second suspect, however, has some extremely compelling personal connections to Elizabeth Short and the neighborhood where she was found.

Speaker 3 And this suspect also slides nicely into the profile that Mindhunter author John Douglas drew up for the perpetrator of the Black Dahlia murder.

Speaker 3 So, let's get into these suspects, starting with probably the most well-known accused killer of Elizabeth Short, Dr. George Hodell.

Speaker 3 With probably one of the most perfect, fancy pervert mustaches in all of history.

Speaker 3 He has got such a good mustache for eating the ass of a child.

Speaker 3 It's almost like, did he do it on purpose? Which was first? Yeah.

Speaker 3 An additional source for George Hodell, by the way, is Exquisite Corpse, Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder by Mark Nelson and Sarah Hudson Bayless, which is an absolutely fascinating book full of incredible art, if you can find it.

Speaker 3 You should have seen me reading that in the, by the light of my car. So I was in my car charging my phone or out of power for the last several days.

Speaker 3 And I sat there and I'm reading the Exquisite Corpse book going through it. I read it from cover to cover.
Yeah, I did too. It's a great book.
It's a great book.

Speaker 3 It's also like, it's definitely a more,

Speaker 3 it's a better version of the George Hodell story, even though it doesn't have all the details that Black Dolly Avenger has and all the stuff, even though whether or not you think they're fake or whatever.

Speaker 3 But I'm sitting here reading this book and I get to the section with all the autopsy pictures, mixed them, you know, comparing them to the surrealist paintings.

Speaker 3 And my neighbor, I just hear a ting, ting, ting, and a headlamp comes into it.

Speaker 3 And I just look into my neighbor looking down and I just see the pool of light just onto the dead open pussy of Elizabeth Sharp, right?

Speaker 3 Like Anthony just sitting in the dark, you know, the winds like room

Speaker 3 and shit. And he comes in, he's just like, I got that battery pack you asked for.
What are you reading?

Speaker 3 This is my show. And then I, I, I'm not even joking.
I sat with him for 20 minutes and I gave him the whole rundown. And I just, he got the podcast.
He got the podcast from me in the car.

Speaker 3 So, yeah, he got to see it too. And that was just, yeah, it was fun.
That's great.

Speaker 3 Now, the reason why we know so much about George Hodell and his connections to the Black Dahlia murder is because his son, Steve Hodell, is so convinced that his father did the crime that he's written nine books on the subject.

Speaker 3 I hate my dad. He just, he's like, my daddy never ate my ass.

Speaker 3 No, that's not true. I'm sorry, Steve Hodell.
Please don't sue us.

Speaker 3 Don't send the police after us. Please, Mr.
Odell. But these guys are, it's interesting.

Speaker 3 He not only thinks that his father did the Black Dahlia murder, but he thinks his father is the biggest criminal that has ever lived. He thinks his father has done every murder.

Speaker 3 He thinks his father is a supervillain. Like his father is like the head of the guild of calamitous intent.

Speaker 3 It's close, but...

Speaker 3 He's bad. Yeah, he's definitely bad.
But, you know, let's get more into this story.

Speaker 3 Now, while nine books make Steve sound like a a crackpot with a penchant for self-publishing, he was actually an LAPD detective supervisor for 24 years.

Speaker 3 He's conducted thousands of criminal investigations and has been involved in 300 murder cases. But because of his resume, he does, according to his very own book, hold himself in very high regard.

Speaker 3 He really does. He's pretty good.
Well, he doesn't sound not.

Speaker 3 I don't want to be mean. He doesn't sound like he's sure of himself, much like Papa was.

Speaker 3 See, I'm a Larry Harnish Harnish guy, so Steve can go fucking suck it. Yeah, see Larry, dude.

Speaker 3 It's me. I'm fucking sitting you Larry.
Listen, dude, let's fucking go to his house, man. Let's TP his house.

Speaker 3 Come on, man. We're talking about Larry Harnish, like the audience knows who the fuck he is.
The audience doesn't know who the fuck Larry Harnish is just yet. He's my fucking boy, dude.

Speaker 3 He's my fucking secondhand soldier, my man general. We talked about him at the end of the last episode.
He is the grumpy. He is now the self-proclaimed grumpiest man in the world.
I love him.

Speaker 3 But according to Steve Hodell, according to himself, Steve was a real-life hero born out of the imagination of Hollywood. Steve wrote this about himself.

Speaker 3 Citizens saw me exactly as they knew me from television. Tall, trim, and handsome.
With spit-shine shoes and a gleaming badge.

Speaker 3 There was no difference between me and my actor cop counterparts on Dragnet or Adam 12. Have you ever had a semen?

Speaker 3 Fucking shine.

Speaker 3 Tell me, buddy. Have you ever shined your shoes with a nice dollop of African semen? Come on, enjoy yourself.
Enjoy yourself at the airport. Just like I did.

Speaker 3 Looking handsome on my way down to my ninth rape case of the week. I've had a spit shine, but never a come shine shoe.
It's so hard to do because you gotta wait. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 So hard. It's like you gotta show him your breasts.
Yeah, you stay, like I said, they'll look away. They look away while you sit there and he's just like, yes, sir, yes, yes, very feminine, sir.

Speaker 3 Very feminine. I tried bringing him a magazine.
He said he didn't want it.

Speaker 3 Very good, sir. Yes, good, proud American man, sir.
I come. I told him I drew nipples on my balls for him.

Speaker 3 Very good little tips. Top of bottom the tick.

Speaker 3 Now after Steve's father, George Hodell, died in 1999, Steve went through his father's things and found pictures of a woman he didn't recognize. Pictures that appeared as if they were from the 1940s.

Speaker 3 As Steve stared at these pictures more and more, he came to believe that these were never-before-seen photos of Elizabeth Short.

Speaker 3 Now, we're not alone in saying that the girl in these pictures is absolutely not Elizabeth Short. We know for a fact, definitely one of them is not Elizabeth Short.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, and these two pictures don't even really look like the same woman. No, they do not.
No, no, no. They kind of look kind of made to be the same, but they just kind of look like ladies.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And it's black and black ladies.
Yeah, and it's black and white, so we can't really tell.

Speaker 3 But the photographs were close enough of a match to send Steve on a mission to delve into his father's past to see if there was some nefarious connection.

Speaker 3 Because Steve did know that his father, George Hodell, had a checkered past, to say the very least. I think that, obviously, just George Hodell's actions as a whole will put him on the suspect list.

Speaker 3 I think it makes a lot of sense. And I think that Stephen Hodell feels a lot of guilt in that way.

Speaker 3 But he also might have some of his father's traits in the way in terms of being extremely bullheaded about very arcane things. Could be.

Speaker 3 So George is definitely a prick bastard whether Steve's right or not.

Speaker 3 Hey, no, Eddie, don't tell him yes. Let Eddie choose after the story.

Speaker 3 Let me see if he decides George Hodell is bad or not.

Speaker 3 So George Hodell, Steve's father and the main suspect of this section, was a Los Angeles native born in 1907.

Speaker 3 He was a musical prodigy with a genius IQ of 186 who eventually decided on a career in medicine.

Speaker 3 Yes, I did receive one more point than Einstein, and I believe it was because when I took the test, I was fully aroused.

Speaker 3 I'm the horniest 10-year-old that's ever been.

Speaker 3 He had the mustache since he was five.

Speaker 3 It fell off his mom's pussy when he was coming out. Let me glue this on my son.

Speaker 3 After med school, Hodell made a name for himself in Hollywood as a sort of doctor to the stars, partnering with a mysterious Japanese physician about whom little is known.

Speaker 3 Someone's got to get the opium. Yeah.

Speaker 3 George also ran a venereal disease clinic, and as a result, he was put in charge of controlling venereal disease in the city of Los Angeles when he was named head of the LA County Health Department in 1939.

Speaker 3 In other words, Hodell had direct connections to the grubbiest parts of this city, and he was a powerful man with a lot of connections to boot. I consider myself more of a vagina sheriff.

Speaker 3 I shall make sure every vagina is clean. It is within the justice system.

Speaker 3 And when it is not, it is thoroughly punished.

Speaker 3 So, George, how do you do those things? Like, what's your main, like, what's your main goal here? I just can tell when a woman is clean by the way she sits in a chair.

Speaker 3 What is your favorite venereal disease? Honestly, it's so hard to choose. It's like choosing which child of mine to have sex with.

Speaker 3 And it's glaucoma because glaucoma doesn't allow you to see who you're having sex with. It's the best to go on a pretzel.

Speaker 3 No, I don't know for sure, but it seems like George Hodell's inside track to Hollywood and beyond ran through a childhood friend. This is incredible.
George grew up with Hollywood legend John Houston.

Speaker 3 Oh,

Speaker 3 he fucking directed the Maltese Falcon, played the main villain in Chinatown. That's part of the world.
He's in Houston's dead. Yeah.
Jan in Houston's dad. And they all led a whole...

Speaker 3 That's the connection. What? Look at that, dude.

Speaker 3 The street I used to live on was named after him. No shit.
Yeah, that was like where he, I honestly think that

Speaker 3 where we lived specifically in North Hollywood, I do weirdly think there's a lot of places where they would like put their like malls.

Speaker 3 They would put their like ladies when they were working at the studios. Oh, the gun malls.

Speaker 3 Yes, the ladies, their girlfriends would stay where we live in North Hollywood and their wives would be in the homes

Speaker 3 of the hill that just got burnt down.

Speaker 3 And then they are just, and then John Houston would work at the studios that are down the street to come over to North Hollywood, fuck all the ladies on the side, and then go home, come wash their penis, and then come home.

Speaker 3 In the LA River.

Speaker 3 Now, George and director John Houston remained friends into adulthood, and they were so close that after John Houston divorced his wife in 1933, George married her soon after. Is that close?

Speaker 3 I think it is because he, well, he knew John Houston. That's how he knew this woman.
And they used to go on double dates with each other's wives, and then they swap wives, essentially.

Speaker 3 I don't know if they swapped wives. I just know that John Houston divorced this woman, Dorothy, and, you know, George Hodell picked her up.

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah, sucked her up.

Speaker 3 I can still taste John's kisses.

Speaker 3 I love five layers of my friend's kisses right on your lips.

Speaker 3 John Houston is a scary-looking man.

Speaker 3 That's why he's one of the greatest villains. Like, his villain, his portrayal of the villain in Chinatown, is one of the greatest villain portrayals in cinematic history.
Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 3 Well, John Houston's ex-wife would become Steve Hodell's mother, although she and George Odell were divorced by 1944 after Steve's mother filed a complaint of extreme cruelty.

Speaker 3 Now, by 1945, George Hodell was one of LA's reigning shady weirdos, performing illegal abortions in between hedonistic orgies held at his Frank Lloyd Wright Jr.

Speaker 3 designed home, which had been bizarrely constructed in the style of a Mayan temple. The Shangri-La of Los Angeles.
Yeah. Have you ever seen it? Have you ever driven past it? No.
It is, it's beautiful.

Speaker 3 It's in Los Filos. You go by, it is this giant.
it looks sort of like a mini Mayan version of the Chrysler building, where it's like, it's got like these kind of mirrored tower to the top.

Speaker 3 It's extremely beautiful. And you could see, you're like, oh, where do Chorus girls go to get murdered on group by Hollywood millionaires? You're like, that house.
It makes a lot of sense.

Speaker 3 If you look at the inside of it, all the sales pictures of it, because there was a whole, when he was trying to sell the house, George Hodel took all these self-pictured, like, oh, he took pictures inside the house of him like modeling it and it looks like a James Bond villain's house and it's just him just being like wouldn't you love to live in the opulence of Shangri-La wouldn't you love to sit in the living room of Shangri-La and it's just all like looks like Kanye West's house yeah where everything's made out of cinder blocks yeah and it's all tile and concrete so if you kill a girl you can just clean it with a hose super easy nice lots of drinks

Speaker 3 now On May 9th, 1945, suspicion fell on George when his secretary suddenly died in his presence.

Speaker 3 On that night, George allegedly called his ex-wife and told her to come over to his secretary's apartment.

Speaker 3 When George's ex-wife arrived, she found George's secretary unconscious from a barbituate overdose.

Speaker 3 Incredibly, Hodel's main concern was not his secretary, but the two manuscripts that she had written, manuscripts that he gave to his ex-wife to burn.

Speaker 3 Hodel's ex-wife did as she was told, and the secretary quickly died from an overdose, while Hodel moved on with his life having squashed whatever secrets she may have had.

Speaker 3 So just let that stick in your head. That is like one of the big cruxes of this entire story.

Speaker 3 That is extraordinarily easily disproved. Of course.
But it's like, yeah, these are the things that Steve Hodell will build the George Hodell story around. Stuff like this.

Speaker 3 The idea that he said, burn these manuscripts, do these. And it's also crazy to think that he was so mean and so crazy, but his ex-wives kept coming back.

Speaker 3 Oh, you know, powerful man. They got lots of money and stuff.
Yeah, that happens a lot in abusive relationships. It's true.

Speaker 3 It's also just like shows how easy it was to just get away with killing someone back then if you had just like a moderate amount of money yeah oh and it continues to this day eddie don't worry

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Speaker 3 Now, when it comes to Hodel's connections, he would host gatherings at his home that centered around drug-fueled hypnotism sessions that were led by George himself.

Speaker 3 And that's when he wasn't hosting the orgies. Now Now we're going to give her Deeper One.
On the counter three, you will turn into the horniest chicken I've ever seen. Three

Speaker 3 cock. Oh, yes.

Speaker 3 Cock.

Speaker 3 Very good.

Speaker 3 Yes, very good.

Speaker 3 Yes, very good.

Speaker 3 Oh, you're not a chicken anymore. Wolf.
Wolf, wolf. Yes.
I'm not telling you hypnotize a dog.

Speaker 3 Easy to do. Let's all fuck it.
Come on, John Houston. Let's get Betty Davis.

Speaker 3 Let's get her a fake cock and have her fuck this dog in front of us, huh? Yeah, all right. Sure, she has Betty Davis eyes, but how about a Betty Davis vagina? Yeah, let's check her.

Speaker 3 That's the thing is that Betty Davis and George Hodell probably did meet each other at the very least because Betty Davis was actually very big in the modern art scene in Los Angeles.

Speaker 3 One of the things I found out is that actually the people that are most responsible for modern art coming to Los Angeles are are Vincent Price, number one. That makes sense.
Yeah, Vincent Price,

Speaker 3 John Houston, and Edgar G. Robinson.
That's awesome. Yeah, isn't it crazy? But also the story of Will Grandma.
Betty Davis was also in the art scene a lot as well. Yeah.
Yeah. All of,

Speaker 3 basically, most of LACMA was like brought here by Vincent Price. Yeah.

Speaker 3 It's fascinating. That's very cool.
Yeah. Yeah, it's crazy shit.
But George Hodell was ensconced within the Los Angeles art scene at this time.

Speaker 3 And these gatherings at George's Place were attended by a wide range of artists, writers, and people in the film industry.

Speaker 3 For writers, for example, novelist Henry Miller was a frequent guest at George Hodell's home. And Henry Miller, if you'll remember, could himself write quite the tawdry tale.

Speaker 3 Yes, I went, I dropped off some Tropic. I had two extra copies of Tropic of Cancer for some reason.
I dropped them off in some little libraries in my neighborhood. Oh my God.

Speaker 3 Nothing makes me happier than putting a satanic book in a church library. It really makes me happy.
I just think it's important for some lady to read about poetry about anal warts.

Speaker 3 It's important. Have you ever read Henry Miller? No.
I'll give you some. All right, great.
I'll not read it then, too.

Speaker 3 But George's company most infamously included the surrealist painter and photographer, Man Ray.

Speaker 3 Now, while people like Henry Miller came in and out of George's world and knew him pretty much as a local eccentric, Man Ray was a family friend of the Hodels and took what I'd call a suspicious amount of photos of both George and his ex-wife.

Speaker 3 And you could, the reason why it's suspicious is because they are like, because Man Ray will go on to kind of deny whatever connections, everyone denies connections to George Hodell, but he obviously was friends with them.

Speaker 3 He took pictures of like candid pictures of his kids, candid pictures of them hanging out. Yes, Man Ray could be, people did pay him to go and take pictures at their home, right?

Speaker 3 Like to come and do a big photographer, like, you know, you go do whatever, I don't even know what the term it is, like a big like actual put-together choreographed film photo shoot. A family photo?

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 But with families. A family photo shoot.
Yeah, a family photo. Yeah.
But Man Ray would do them. Which I think is fascinating.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, you get incredible fucking photos.

Speaker 3 I mean, Man Ray is nothing if not extraordinarily talented. I mean, his work is incredible,

Speaker 3 you know, despite what we may say about his personal life. How many photos of your wife in someone else's possession is too much?

Speaker 3 I'd say, like, five. Well, it depends on what situation.
Yeah. If it's from across the street, if I paid them to take pictures as many as many as many as I paid for.

Speaker 3 Well, then they're going to go through all the negatives anyway and choose. Yeah.
So you don't even get to choose those pictures. Yeah.

Speaker 3 But to understand why the connection between George Hodell and Man Ray is so interesting, you got to understand a little bit about surrealism, which is the art movement that Man Ray belonged to and the one that George Hodell was obsessed with.

Speaker 3 So fucking get your holes ready, dude, because it's time for, oh shit, do we got a good lick for this shit? shit it's art history

Speaker 3 dude the fucking coming for you surrealism it's the art of space

Speaker 3 the art of space

Speaker 3 continue

Speaker 3 yeah no i'm glad you guys fucking prepped it you guys lubed up the chamber thank you ready ready for art history well basically surrealism was the next step after the dada movement defined in the book exquisite Corpse as a heady call to arms, extolling freedom of imagination and liberation from social constraints.

Speaker 3 All anal.

Speaker 3 Style-wise, it's just like it sounds. Like, it's surreal, it's unsettling stuff.
You know, Salvador Dali, he's the most well-known surrealist artist out there.

Speaker 3 Everyone's, yeah, the good shit. Everyone's got, everyone's seen a surrealist painting in their life.
These fucking stupid clocks can't not be melted and shit. Fucking time, dudes.
Eddie, dumb.

Speaker 3 It's hard. You never, I know you're afraid of clocks in in the first place because you don't even like the concept of time.
I know, Eddie. You said clock.
I know. I'll fucking rip your hand off.

Speaker 3 You put a watch on it. I know.
I'm going to fucking chew on your fingers. This is just art history, Eddie.

Speaker 3 No, times.

Speaker 3 It's not real. You calm down? You good?

Speaker 3 Yeah, we're very warm. Yeah.
Any number under 13 just fucking gets me going. He has a hard time with it.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 He has a hard time with it. He can't deal with it.
He loves a baker's design.

Speaker 3 But the surrealism also remember, the goal was to break through what they were having problems with what they did viewed as like the stayed kind of realism movement that was happening.

Speaker 3 And surrealism came out of World War I because of the horrors and the atrocities that humans did.

Speaker 3 The idea was to sort of break through to the subconscious in many different ways. So they would try all these different exercises to try to get through to the subconscious and create that.

Speaker 3 And from a direct concept, from the artist to the canvas. Now, at times, surrealism was an interplay of irrationality, eroticism, and violence.

Speaker 3 And when it came to women in in Surrealism, they were rarely displayed as fully human entities in Surrealist art.

Speaker 3 Rather, the women in Surrealist paintings and photography, particularly the works of Man Ray, featured recurring motifs of bisected and fragmented women, just as Elizabeth Short was bisected and fragmented.

Speaker 3 Now, many of the Surrealists were fascinated with violence, both real and imagined.

Speaker 3 In the real world, they were captivated by true crime stories, violent accounts of Catholic saints, and Jack the Ripper.

Speaker 3 But they were also obsessed with the fictional writings of the Marquis de Saad, particularly his unfinished novel, 120 Days of Sodom. Yeah, dude, it's about 30 days too long.

Speaker 3 I watched Solo. We all see, you saw Solo, right? I didn't see Solo.
You've never seen it? No. Let's go take a look at it.
I've read like graphic representations of 120 Days of Sodom, though.

Speaker 3 It's a fucking foul. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Awful. Yeah, it's a fun or whatever.

Speaker 3 Some people like it. No, I haven't seen it.

Speaker 3 I mean, it's not like every graphic graphic representation, because if you graphically represented the things that happened in 120 Days of Sodom, you would be producing child pornography.

Speaker 3 Well, that's the part you really got to skip.

Speaker 3 That's what I'd say. I'd say that is less is moral.

Speaker 3 Now to briefly recap the story, because it is important, 120 Days of Sodom is a novel from 1785 about four rich libertine Frenchmen who spend four months in a secluded castle in the middle of the forest trying to top each other in the realm of sexual perversion.

Speaker 3 It's a true exploration of the rarer fragrances.

Speaker 3 And what are the rarer fragrances? Every single time you hear the term, like George Hodell, this is a thing that comes up a lot in like artsy, fartsy, old school erotica.

Speaker 3 Like, oh, yes, an exploration of the rarer fragrances,

Speaker 3 which always means butthole. Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
The rarer fragrance. Yeah, pussy juice.
It's pussy juices and butthole messes.

Speaker 3 We're using 20 victims and eight male accomplices with large penises. Accomplices Desad simply call the fuckers.
Yes, hey, yeah, we're the fuckers, you order.

Speaker 3 Yeah, we're the fuckers. Just so you know, I got a heart out at eight.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I gotta be fucking at the White House tonight. All right.
But when I'm done with this, it'll be the Brown House. Yeah, I'd say it anyway, but that's just kind of a joke between fuckers.

Speaker 3 We mostly say that. You know how it is.
I come out, I fuck.

Speaker 3 You know, sometimes I shoot myself in the head and I wake up and I'm just alive again. And I just go out and I fuck again and a bunch of stuff.
And then I get ripped apart by a bunch of dogs.

Speaker 3 And then all of a sudden, I just wake up again. And then I go and I fuck.
And then I get burnt alive with a bunch of acid and shit. I don't know, man.
I'm sorry. Did you mean to order suckers?

Speaker 3 Because we're fuckers.

Speaker 3 That's the sucker.

Speaker 3 Well, using 20 victims in this story, the four Frenchmen engage in incest, rape, necrophilia, bestiality, coprophilia, urine drinking, vomit drinking, and child sex abuse until it all culminates in murder most foul.

Speaker 3 And I do mean foul. I do everything but feet stuff.

Speaker 3 That's the only thing I can't stand. It can stand feet, but otherwise, I'll fuck a jar of peanut butter into the mouth of a giraffe.
All right. I will fuck whatever it is you knew.

Speaker 3 I got a nine-inch cock and it doesn't matter. It works until I'm dead.

Speaker 3 What's coprophilia? Eating shit. Ah, cool.
Yeah. Hell yeah.
You learned something new today. Well, thank God.

Speaker 3 But above all else, the novel 120 Days of Sodom is so depraved as to be totally surreal.

Speaker 3 And the surrealist movement of the 20th century loved the novel for both its style and because they fancied themselves as libertines free from all social constraints.

Speaker 3 Surrealists, much like any group of artists, they fancy themselves a little bit more hardcore than they actually are. Oh, yes.

Speaker 3 As the wife of Surrealist painter Max Ernst put it, most surrealists flew close to the flame of Desaud on an intellectual level, but as for emulating the fantasies of Desad's persone, they didn't even try.

Speaker 3 There are a bunch of people that wear suits too much to be eating that much shit. Oh, yeah.
You know, they all wear suits.

Speaker 3 But because the surrealists didn't dabble, that did not mean that some of them weren't associated with the people who did. People like George Hodell.

Speaker 3 I view George Hodell as a a Jeffrey Epstein-like character. Yeah, very close to that type.

Speaker 3 Yeah, just like this sort of like rich puppet master with a lot of very famous friends, a lot of very well-known friends,

Speaker 3 throws a lot of parties

Speaker 3 and comes very close to getting

Speaker 3 to getting some sort of comeuppance, but never quite gets there. Someone who's a lot of fun until you really get to know him.
Well, the problem is. A lot of fun for about an hour and a half.

Speaker 3 And it's a lot of fun that you're definitely having at somebody else's expense and you're not asking a lot of questions about.

Speaker 3 And then what it does in its own way is that it creates its own secret keeping mechanism, as we've seen. George Hurdell is a, he is a lot of money.

Speaker 3 He has weird, we don't really know what he does for a living. He does a bunch of different stuff, right? He's a doctor, a Hollywood doctor to the stars, but it's very vague.

Speaker 3 But gives them drugs. Yes, and helps them with venereal diseases on the down low, helps them with abortions on the down low, helps them with any

Speaker 3 various problems that would be considered publicly embarrassing. That is somebody who traffics in secrets.
Like, that is his job as to traffic in secrets.

Speaker 3 So, then, what is happening is that then other secrets congregate, and it takes a type of person.

Speaker 3 And I think George Hodell, it's why we think he could have within his depths, he might be one considered to do, he would have considered to do the Black Dahlia murder because he just was so kind of in his own world of ideas that no one cared.

Speaker 3 He viewed himself as past everyone.

Speaker 3 Believe Steve's blowing up daddy's spot, man. You leave daddy alone, Steve.

Speaker 3 Now, the surrealist painter and photographer, Man Ray, moved to Los Angeles at the age of 50 after escaping World War II Europe, and he eventually made friends with George Hodell in Los Angeles.

Speaker 3 Man Ray's work, which often featured nude women, was said to be the finest defense of surrealism's central theme of transgressions via eroticism, which pointed more towards death than sexuality.

Speaker 3 In one photograph, Man Ray did a self-portrait of himself lying on top of the dead body of a woman killed by a gunshot.

Speaker 3 And in one of his paintings, Man Ray portrayed an abstract female bisected at the waist, just like Elizabeth Short was.

Speaker 3 Both of these works were finished in the 30s, years before the Black Dahlia murder.

Speaker 3 And we're not saying that Man Ray was directly involved in the killing of Elizabeth Short, but he has been named as a person who may have involved himself in George Hodell's more disgusting pursuits.

Speaker 3 He was around for the parties. Yeah.
Man Ray was probably around for a lot of the parties, and Man Ray was one of these guys.

Speaker 3 But I think that that was his main connection to this art world like he had other

Speaker 3 was Man Ray was the guy that was his like buddy that was the guy that was like showing up and taking pictures of other people and doing other things and then may or may not have taken a bunch of naked pictures of his daughter yeah it's like you don't have to be so weird now did he took a picture on top of an actual dead woman or was it staged no staged oh yeah it was art yeah

Speaker 3 now we don't know for sure how Man Ray and George Hodell connected in the first place, but George Hodell was certainly an arty weirdo and the Los Angeles art world in the 1940s was predictably small.

Speaker 3 George Hodell's throwing around a lot of money and he's buying a lot of works of art.

Speaker 3 And that's the thing, is that no one can really figure out why Man Ray went to Los Angeles in the first place, although he said it was to get as far away from the war as possible.

Speaker 3 What we do know is that Man Ray was close to George Hodell in the 11 years he lived in Los Angeles, and this was confirmed by George Hodell's daughter, Tamar.

Speaker 3 There was a little bit of a hint of why he went to Los Angeles in terms of apparently the art scene itself was starting to die out in New York.

Speaker 3 So all of surrealism right after World War II came to New York and it turned into this essentially kind of a commercial enterprise.

Speaker 3 Salvador Dali, everyone kind of got mad at Salvador Dali because at this point, Salvador Dali was on like television shows. He was showing himself to be the face of

Speaker 3 Disney. Yes, he's doing all of these things and he's making a lot of money and he's taking private commissions and to them he's ruining surrealism because he's making it about commercialism.

Speaker 3 And so that might be one of the reasons why Man Ray moved from New York to L.A. Yeah.

Speaker 3 But as far as Man Ray's connections to George Hodell goes, George Hodell's daughter, Tamar, said that Man Ray often photographed the whole family.

Speaker 3 And she said that he took nude photographs of her on occasion when she was still a young teenager.

Speaker 3 That, however, is not the worst of what happened to Tamar in George Hodell's home, because the thing that happened to Tamar is the catalyst to why we even know about George Hodell in the first place.

Speaker 3 And that's what makes me fucking wonder so much is like, we just know George Hodell because of what I'm about to talk about. How many George Hodells have existed in Los Angeles?

Speaker 3 How many have existed in this city over the last 120-some odd years?

Speaker 3 Up to like this century. Oh, before.

Speaker 3 No, there's still a George Hodell today, but how many have there been? I mean, at least. I'm going to say 150.
Oh, years up. There is a pack of them.

Speaker 3 I think that anybody could go to a place where it is, it was lawless out here. And if you had a lot of money, you could really figure it out.

Speaker 3 And then if you read the works of Kenneth Henger, this happened way more than we even think it did. But then that might be exaggerated.

Speaker 3 It's also not only was it lawless, like it wasn't even in check, like New York's in check with the mafia. You know, like the mafia wasn't even in control out here.
No.

Speaker 3 Well, in October of 1949, Tamar Hodell, who was then just 14 years old. old, she told police that during one of her father's orgies at their home, he had raped her.

Speaker 3 And this act was witnessed by two other people. Hodell was soon arrested and put on trial for this horrific crime.
George Hodel's lawyers had a simple plan for getting their client acquitted.

Speaker 3 Their plan was to discredit Tamar Hodell completely, to make her look crazy, and they partly did so by using the Black Dahlia murder.

Speaker 3 During a conversation with the man who rented a room in their home, Tamar had said that her father's house had secret passages, and that her father was going to kill her and everyone else in the house because he had an insatiable bloodlust.

Speaker 3 That bloodlust, Tamar had said, had already taken a victim, the infamous Black Dahlia. Now, Tamar was obviously making a joke.
She said so.

Speaker 3 Yeah, she said that they were talking about it sort of in a ridiculous way of the other things that he could have done. Because it was the most popular news story of the time, probably.
Exactly.

Speaker 3 It's the worst thing you can say that someone did. Like, oh, he killed the black.
He's the Black Dahlia killer. You know, it's like, it's a byword for psychopath.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 But the lawyers used these comments to make Tamara look like she'd say just about anything to smear her father, and their scheme worked perfectly.

Speaker 3 While there was plenty of evidence against Hodell, he was eventually acquitted of all charges, although he did make a few well-placed bribes along the way to make sure that happened.

Speaker 3 Again, the corruption muddles things. But what was interesting about the acquittal was the reaction from Man Ray, or should I say, the lack of reaction from photographer Man Ray.

Speaker 3 A year after George's incest trial, Man Ray sent a friendly postcard to George from Paris, asking Hodell if he wanted anything from France besides a coquette, which is another word for a tart or a floozy.

Speaker 3 You know, I always like to write postcards casually, my friend, saying, You want me to traffic a woman for you?

Speaker 3 Hurt your lonely. I actually can, I can abduct a woman for you and take her from this country if you want.
Yeah, even in joking, who says that? Hey, buddy, hey, Marcus.

Speaker 3 So you're going, oh, I see you're leaving town. When you come back, could you bring me a trafficked woman?

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't like her to like it.
I don't want her to agree. I want her to be against her will.
Yeah, younger the better. Thank you if you could, baby, looking for a baby.

Speaker 3 Well, this stone suggests that Man Ray was not in the least bit disturbed by Hodell's incest trial.

Speaker 3 But when it comes to the surrealist link to the Black Dahlia murder, one of the most interesting parallels involves a game called Exquisite Corpse, which is what the book we use today is named after.

Speaker 3 It does sound like one of those like the blood on the dance floor kind of like weird like new metal bands. You know what I mean? Like one of those weird scream metals.

Speaker 3 Oh, there had to have been a Screamo band called Exquisite Corpse at some point. Yeah, right? There's a band called the Black Dahlia Murder.
Our friend. Yeah.

Speaker 3 It's like if artists played the aristocrats. Aristocrats.

Speaker 3 Well, the Exquisite Corpse is a fun name, but it is just a game. Yeah, and it's not necessarily to see who can do like the most disgusting thing or anything like that.

Speaker 3 Like, it's just to kind of see who can do the most inventive thing. Well, in the Exquisite Corpse game, three artists take turns drawing a section of a body without seeing any other section.

Speaker 3 The first takes the head and shoulders, the second draws the torso, and the third finishes up everything below the waist.

Speaker 3 Exquisite Corpse was particularly popular with the Surrealists, and in 1934, an Exquisite Corpse drawing by four noted Surrealist artists that bore a large number of similarities to the mutilations performed on Elizabeth Short's body got published.

Speaker 3 And this is about 13 years before Elizabeth Short was killed. Whoa.

Speaker 3 In this delicate crayon-on-paper depiction of a woman's body, the figure's breasts are replaced by simple circular shapes that enclose asymmetrical triangles.

Speaker 3 As you might remember, when we talked about Elizabeth Short's autopsy, her right breast was removed, which left behind a circular wound.

Speaker 3 And on her left breast, a triangular shape was cut out of her skin, just to the right of her nipple.

Speaker 3 In the exquisite corpse drawing in question, there's also a yellow mark just above the genital area, which corresponds to the vertical incision made on Elizabeth Short's body in in the exact same place.

Speaker 3 But most important was the position of this drawing's arms.

Speaker 3 See, a woman with her arms raised above her head was a weirdly common motif in surrealism, but it was specifically common in the works of Man Ray.

Speaker 3 In multiple Man Ray photographs, he features solitary nude women over and over again with their arms bent, held over their head.

Speaker 3 And the woman in the exquisite corpse drawing we're talking about here has her arms in the same position.

Speaker 3 The position of the arms in both the drawing and Man Ray's photos mirror the exact way Elizabeth Short's body was found. I feel like I know her, but sometimes my arms bend back.

Speaker 3 It's again, it's another David Lynch connection. Yeah, Man.
It's just a picture of the picture of the lady is a definite connection. Yeah, but this motif didn't stop with Man Ray.

Speaker 3 There was an incredible amount of surrealist art by multiple artists created both before and after the Black Dahlia murder that look uncannily like the crime scene photos taken in Le Mert Park in a way that no other art movement connects to a specific murder.

Speaker 3 Well, you know what the do you know what the Minotaur means? The Minotaur. I mean the Minotaur is, I mean, that's a little too far.

Speaker 3 Like, I thought about going into the Minotaur, but the Minotaur is like a massive side quest.

Speaker 3 Just quick, the reason why the Minotaur is even used, the position that she's in, it was considered to be the Minotaur position.

Speaker 3 The Minotaur was this half-man, half-beast character that was put in the center of a labyrinth, and because he was this abomination, and then Theseus went all the way through to attack the monster and then he used a golden thread to find his way out of the labyrinth but the whole thing is about what they say it's about the Freudian dip into the subconscious going through the labyrinth to find the minotaur which is the thing inside of you that you maybe don't want to see or the thing unknown inside of you that you don't want to see and then pulling it out which is why the surrealists were using that so in this theory Elizabeth Short was an art piece yeah let's get into it now the posing of Elizabeth Short's body has always been one of the biggest question marks in the Black Dahlia case, one that no one has ever been able to fully satisfy.

Speaker 3 In fact, it's one that most people haven't even been able to approach. No.
But author Steve Hodell, George Hodell's son, he thinks that he cracked it using something he calls a thought print.

Speaker 3 You know how your fingers got a print, and your butt's got a print when you sit in the sand.

Speaker 3 Sometimes your thought could have a print. Oh, Jesus.
Yeah, no, listen.

Speaker 3 No, listen. It's easy to do.
My thumbprint. Uh-huh.
My fingerprint. Yeah.
My butt print. Gotcha.
My thought print. I don't like it.

Speaker 3 According to Steve, thought prints, like fingerprints. It's like a fingerprint.
Okay, all right. It's like a butt print.
It's different every time. Everybody got a different button.

Speaker 3 God damn it, Steve. You got to get out of here.

Speaker 3 Well, thought prints relate to the potential identification of a specific individual through his or her own unique thinking and thoughts. It's a thought print.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Well, the thinking behind the posing of Short's body, Steve maintains, is that the killer was a surrealist who wanted to shock the world with the most transgressive work of art in history.

Speaker 3 This would be a surrealist who took the motifs of bisection, raised arms, and mutilation to the next level by using an actual woman as the canvas. Genius!

Speaker 3 Absolutely exemplary.

Speaker 3 And the reason why they call it the Minotaur position, you know, with the arms raised up, is because of a Man Ray photograph called Minotaur,

Speaker 3 which shows just a woman's torso and her arms raised up above her head, and the shadows make it look like a bull's head, you know, like the breasts, the nipples of the eyes,

Speaker 3 you know, and the arms are the horns, but that's how it came to be known as the Minotaur position. I got you.
I just don't think an artist could keep their mouth shut if they did accomplish this.

Speaker 3 Well, that was the idea is that then the show-off of the corpse is their gallery. Oh, but they would like to say that I'm the one, I'm the greatest, I created the Minotaur of short.
It's possible.

Speaker 3 Yes. Well, and that's the thing: there are other theories that would make that even more difficult.

Speaker 3 It's been posited in the past that the Black Dahlia murder was the work of more than one person because of the differing ways in which the body was mutilated and manipulated at the crime scene.

Speaker 3 But the authors of the book Exquisite Corpse take that theory one step further.

Speaker 3 They submit that a group of people familiar with surrealism may have tried to recreate an exquisite corpse game with the body of this young woman.

Speaker 3 What's so hard is to be the first one, and then you got her there and she's alive and stuff.

Speaker 3 And you're like, well, if I just put a hat on her, you know, and then other guys, like, well, then what do I do? Like, put a sash on her or something like that.

Speaker 3 And next thing you know, honestly, you just become fashion designers and you're just dressing this woman. She was art.
It could have birthed the first murder critic.

Speaker 3 That's what we are. Yeah.
That's what we are. You know what? I don't get it.

Speaker 3 Two thumbs down.

Speaker 3 Sorry, uninspired.

Speaker 3 Well, in keeping with the general idea of the exquisite corpse game, multiple people may have taken turns with Elizabeth Short's body, each of them inscribing their signatures on her legs, genitals, torso, breasts, and face.

Speaker 3 What if I just, again, what if I just wanted to draw on her? We're artists, right? Could I just draw a circle on her or something? Here's a knife. Have fun.

Speaker 3 I just wish I could get a marker or something. Can I get a paintbrush?

Speaker 3 No, knives only. I just, I hate this surrealist thing.
I thought this was imagination.

Speaker 3 The D could be for Dali.

Speaker 3 It could. Oh, shit.
He did it with the lobster. Oh.
And the lobster did it. Or du creme.

Speaker 3 And all the poop in her from Poop Casso.

Speaker 3 That doesn't even make sense. I wouldn't allow that.
That doesn't make any sense. P Casso.
If it was piss.

Speaker 3 I would say I realized that she wasn't filled with piss. They

Speaker 3 changed it at the last second. Wow.
Quick thinking. True comedio.

Speaker 3 You're just sitting here doing pissed and shit, man.

Speaker 3 She's a regular Cumbrand.

Speaker 3 Nope, Rembrandt. Get completely mad at him.
No, now we're over. We're gone.

Speaker 3 We're in the Palisades.

Speaker 3 Well, thus inspired, the authors wrote, this group would have crafted what they viewed as the most exquisite corpse of all. Yes!

Speaker 3 Wouldn't that be the most devilish of all?

Speaker 3 And that's that's the kind of the problem with a lot of these theories is that they do require cartoonishly villainous characters. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Well, and I also will put the exquisite corpse book, which I love, and I love all the art history in it. I will put it almost in the true crime, like,

Speaker 3 overboard world of thinking.

Speaker 3 They kind of act like they're treating the surrealist painters like the West Memphis 3.

Speaker 3 Just because they were like hanging out and doing all these like quote-unquote like like weird dirty things like that they were then criminals.

Speaker 3 It kind of feels like you're getting mad at people for listening to Marilyn Manson and you think it's going to cause it's causing school shootings where it's like, no, this is that artists are inherently, I love artists, pussies.

Speaker 3 You're not going to do this.

Speaker 3 It's just physical. They're not physical.
They're mental. You know what I mean? This is a mental spiritual creatures.
Like it's going to be the big jump.

Speaker 3 The idea of four of them getting together to do it would be, I think, a bit impossible, especially if somebody like George Hodell, because unless George Hodell killed all of them.

Speaker 3 The only way this whole theory to me holds is that George Odell did the Black Dolly, but he also killed everybody involved.

Speaker 3 I just don't think they would stop at one person. I think if it was an art piece, they would kill multiple people, especially if they didn't get caught and got this much press.

Speaker 3 Well, look at Leopold and Loeb. Those are guys that were definitely did it for the art of it.
They did it for the mental exercise of it.

Speaker 3 Yes. Yeah.

Speaker 3 So now that we've talked about the surrealist links to the murder, let's return to George Hodell and how he came to be connected to the Black Dahlia.

Speaker 3 See, while his lawyer did succeed in getting George acquitted by making George's daughter look crazy because of what she'd said about George being the Black Dahlia killer, the plan backfired when the police opened a file to thoroughly investigate George for the murder.

Speaker 3 Isn't this interesting in the fact that if this is how much time has changed, where back in the day, they actually were offended by the fact that they thought that he fucked his daughter instead of it like covering for him.

Speaker 3 Like they were mad, they covered for the other people, but they didn't cover cover for George Hodell.

Speaker 3 They went looking for George Hodell, unlike Jeffrey Epstein when the entire South Florida judicial group all like flipped over backwards to make sure that he was fine.

Speaker 3 Yeah, no, not in Los Angeles, not with George Hodell. Not with this one.
Yeah. Well, the cops snuck a bug into Hodell's house and tapped his phone.

Speaker 3 But because George had connections, he was well aware he was being monitored and therefore engaged in lots of loud sex, erotic poetry readings, and an inordinate amount of toilet flushes to toy with the the cops.

Speaker 3 Another log gone.

Speaker 3 Another log missed. I hope you enjoy this next show I'm about to do for you, Lieutenant.
Oh, oh, oh, I'm touching my butthole. I'm touching my butthole, Mr.
Homicide Detective. Oh, oh, oh.

Speaker 3 I'm shitting on a plate and feeding it to my daughter.

Speaker 3 Show me on a plate. Come and get me.

Speaker 3 Come and arrest me.

Speaker 3 Well, Hodel was also aware that his phone was being tapped. and during a conversation with a friend, Hodell said, quote, Supposing I did kill the Black Dogger.
They couldn't prove it now.

Speaker 3 They can't talk to my secretary anymore, because she's dead.

Speaker 3 Now, a lot of people have used this statement as proof that George Hodell killed Elizabeth Short, but one has to question why Hodell would say something so damning when he knew the police were listening.

Speaker 3 Because why wouldn't they come and arrest him immediately? Well, most likely, Hodell said it because he knew there was no truth to it, because Hodell obviously liked playing with people.

Speaker 3 For example, his secretary died in May of 1945, almost two years before Elizabeth Short was killed. In fact, the secretary died before Elizabeth Short even came to Los Angeles.

Speaker 3 So the manuscripts that she was asked to burn, whatever that was. It's filled with a bunch of other haunted shit.
That's the thing. It's like, that's my main thing with George Hodell,

Speaker 3 I think he's guilty of plenty of other things that he didn't want people to know about. He physically could not have ran into Elizabeth Short.

Speaker 3 I think every suspect has killed somebody but Elizabeth Short. Everybody has done crimes to everybody else but Elizabeth Short.

Speaker 3 She is still the only person that has not been touched by any one of these people. George Hodell definitely killed his secretary.
I think he absolutely is a murderer.

Speaker 3 I think he's a pedophile and a rapist. He's not the Black Dahlia murderer.
See, when it comes to making George a good suspect, the connections more or less end with all the surrealist stuff.

Speaker 3 It's very interesting, of course. Oh, yeah.
That's why we talked about it. It's fascinating to see all these parallels.

Speaker 3 Also, you wonder if it's just because their goal is to go back into the subconscious, right? So they're creating these subconscious works of art.

Speaker 3 Oftentimes, because of the material that they were reading too, all the Freudian analysis, all the other stuff that's

Speaker 3 all the Marquis de Sade. It was all very sexual and dark.

Speaker 3 So what they were doing was accessing their imagination to be totally pure, but let's just say maybe they had preconceived ideas of the drawings that they want to make.

Speaker 3 Humanity, they're trying to do what they, they're trying to do experiments, but you're pulling stuff out that just might be really common.

Speaker 3 One female surrealist, I forgot her name, she talked about the bisected woman imagery for as a celebration of women. This was like what George Dave.
She only painted the chinese.

Speaker 3 But she said that it was a way for essentially these nerdy, sexless men to understand women. Like they actually viewed it as a way for they They put women on a pedestal in that world.

Speaker 3 That's kind of why they were torn apart all the times because they were kind of viewed as sort of like art pieces, which just

Speaker 3 dehumanize a woman, but it doesn't mean you're killing them. Yeah, that doesn't.

Speaker 3 Now, as far as George Odell goes, Steve Hodell maintains that George's handwriting is similar to the letters that the so-called Black Dahlia Avenger sent.

Speaker 3 But there's absolutely no evidence connecting Elizabeth Short to George Odell in any way whatsoever. There isn't any.

Speaker 3 The handwriting analysis goes back and forth. It really does.

Speaker 3 No, I mean, like I said, that's something that Steve claims, and, you know, there's plenty of arguments to be made against the handwriting analysis.

Speaker 3 Did you try to read the chapter on the handwriting analysis in Black Dolly Avenger? No. It's like 40 pages talking about Ts and P's and Bs and H's and O's and N's.
How about Q's?

Speaker 3 No.

Speaker 3 Uncommon letter. Uncommon.

Speaker 3 I don't think they were in the Black Dolly Avenger. There's just this breakdown of, like, as you could see, with the lilting

Speaker 3 surface of

Speaker 3 his second O's within each one of his words with two O's. You're like, no, I don't, it's a thought.
It's a die. It's gobbling cock.
I'm going to fucking jump off a bridge.

Speaker 3 If I hear one more thing about P's and P's, I'm going to fucking come here, kill myself. I'm going to walk into the fires.
So, what do they think about lowercase J's?

Speaker 3 Because those are very important. A lot of them really tell you how you feel about certain religions.

Speaker 3 How crooked your J's are.

Speaker 3 Well, the thing is that two women who knew Hodell, they were convinced that he knew Elizabeth. But most of the people who knew and worked with George Hodell said that he never met her.

Speaker 3 And Elizabeth Short never mentioned George Hodell, nor did she mention a George Hodell type to anyone she knew.

Speaker 3 And the thing is that also the people who knew George Hodell said that there was no way he would have, like, if he would have killed a woman, he would not have displayed her body out for all the world to see and then communicated with the press about it.

Speaker 3 He would have kept it a secret. Like George Hodell was a man of secrets.

Speaker 3 In my mind, it's the, if you did that as a George Hodell, why in the ever-living fuck would ever leave that killing floor?

Speaker 3 Like, I feel like it's one of those things where you would bring people to the killing floor. Yeah.
George Odell was, he always, he did not like, he didn't leave his house. You know what I mean?

Speaker 3 Like the parties came to him. Things came to him.
So the fact that he would then go out of his way to portray this does that, it doesn't fit his character. Yeah, but she was hollowed out.

Speaker 3 They took the blood out of her. You know, maybe they were trying to make it so it wasn't as stinky.
They could have correct. You know, they did, they definitely was for transport.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 But the thing that drives the story the furthest from George Hodell is the location of the body. Hodell had no reason to be in LeMert Park.

Speaker 3 It was a 30-minute drive from his home, and there's no reason why George would dump Elizabeth Short's shoes and purse in a trash can on Crenshaw Boulevard.

Speaker 3 Hodell also didn't drive a Black Ford sedan like the one seen on the morning of the body's discovery, seen by two different people, And most importantly, he was recovering from a heart attack in January of 1947.

Speaker 3 That heart attack had kept him in the hospital for a month, which meant that he was far too weak to murder Elizabeth Short with such brutality, never mind strong enough to move the body.

Speaker 3 Basically, Hodell was investigated because he had bribed his way through his incest trial and had skated the charges. And he was probably a pretty well-known creepist.
Yes, yeah.

Speaker 3 And I think that George Hodell, he's one of those characters.

Speaker 3 And I think people like him and Jeffrey Epstein, they do have their claws in deep to certain people in the government and certain people out there, like in administrative positions, but others take one look at him and say, I'm not going within 10 fucking feet of that guy.

Speaker 3 And I want to see that fucker in a jail cell. Because they were correct.

Speaker 3 Because if you look at somebody Jeffrey Epstein, technically, I mean, yes, he was a financial advisor, but the way he really made his money was by being a spy.

Speaker 3 And then you also wonder with George Hodell if he did. something along the same lines.

Speaker 3 Well, two members of the DA's office were demoted because they lost George Hodell's incest case. So it's said that the DA put him on the suspect list for simple revenge.
Totally conceive.

Speaker 3 That makes total sense.

Speaker 3 Let's just make his life hard for a little while.

Speaker 3 He thinks he's bigger than us. He's not bigger than me.
We're the gangsters. We're the LAPD.
He's not bigger than us. This whole theory.

Speaker 3 So, like, leading from last episode into this episode, this is getting towards the end of the actual of the time investigation. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Because as they were going, this is one of the last real suspects that they hit, too.

Speaker 3 So by the time they got to him, I think they were so angry at being questioned for so long that they were like, you're not bigger than us. Like, we cover up other crimes, buddy.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 But like, we cover up, we are, we are, yes, we're the LAPD. Yes, we run a racketeering organization.
Yes, we do human trafficking, but we're not pedophiles. Like, that was the line at the time.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and they're like, he was an embarrassment to them. And that's kind of the reason why they threw the book at OJ when they finally got him for the trophy thing.
They had to, because

Speaker 3 someone had to say something. Yeah, what they call it, the fifth quarter.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Now, Steve Hodell still believes wholeheartedly that his father is the best suspect.

Speaker 3 Despite his best efforts, though, Steve says that the Black Dahlia case is still unsolved for several reasons.

Speaker 3 For one, when Elizabeth Short was still alive, she obscured her life to everyone she knew, which makes putting together a clear picture of her a near impossibility.

Speaker 3 That is actually, that's absolutely true, but it's not proof of George Hodell's guilt.

Speaker 3 No, it just shows how difficult it is to investigate a crime when the killer, like what we are now in the world of in these theories, is that the killer was not remotely connected to Elizabeth Short, did not know Elizabeth Short, was not connected to anybody around Elizabeth Short.

Speaker 3 There is a this is somebody outside, this is an outside actor, and it's extremely difficult to catch somebody for a motiveless crime. Yeah, especially if they just do it once.

Speaker 3 Yeah, they do it for sexual thrills. Yeah, because that's the reason why most serial killers get caught is that it's not necessarily

Speaker 3 because the cops are so damn good at their job.

Speaker 3 It's that when a serial killer kills another person person and another person and another person, they get sloppier the longer they go on, and they eventually just make a mistake that's so egregious that basically they fall into a cop's lap.

Speaker 3 Yeah. You know, it just happens again and again.
Start getting cocky. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Well, second, Steve says that reporters and detectives have bought into various myths about the case which have clouded their minds to the truth, which is what every single person who covers this case says about every other person's theory that isn't their own.

Speaker 3 Exactly. That's why I am sick of the various myths.
And I'm sick of people having their minds clouded because I know what happened. We talked about it last episode.
Her waist just did that.

Speaker 3 She did this to herself. Yeah.
This is suicide. All of this was the coup.
Simple coup.

Speaker 3 Actually, I did read, and I think I can't remember which book it was, but when they were at the crime scene, one of the detectives did step over Elizabeth Short's body and say, God, these suicides just break me up.

Speaker 3 Jesus Christ.

Speaker 3 Jesus Christ. People are made out of Legos.

Speaker 3 But most importantly, from Steve's perspective, he claims that every detective who worked this case has intentionally sanitized or destroyed information connecting the killing to George Hodell because of Hodell's powerful connections and the possible compromise he may have obtained on those connections during his many orgies.

Speaker 3 It's been like 80 years

Speaker 3 when that stuff... Is it some of that heat died? down on some of these it's all been burned away it's never coming back you know i've never been to an orgy without a bunch of cops

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 3 someone's got to hold the line. That is true.
That is true. Especially with all the ticker tape everywhere, and you got all the cars driving through.
You got the cuffs.

Speaker 3 I mean, all the orgies that I've been to have been pretty chill affairs. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I've watched a lot of orgies through glass.

Speaker 3 And what I've noticed from watching them, I can see that, yes, humans do need to communicate, don't they?

Speaker 3 Orgies are more awkward than anything. Yeah, I bet.
They're very awkward. I just know I come in three minutes and I can't imagine the hang.

Speaker 3 I can't imagine right as soon as I've done blown and I'm just sitting there like, well,

Speaker 3 okay, well, Zoe, can we get food?

Speaker 3 And that's the awkward part. Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah. And then,

Speaker 3 well, I guess

Speaker 3 let me let you go. Yeah, and then I guess if they were all great conversationalists, they wouldn't have to fuck each other.

Speaker 3 Then it would turn into an improv show.

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Speaker 3 Well, Steve also claims that a string of dozens of unsolved Los Angeles kidnappings and murders suddenly stopped in 1958 when George Odell moved to the Philippines, which is where he died sometime after.

Speaker 3 In fact, Steve lays dozens of murders at his father's feet, making George Odell one of the most prolific serial murderers of his day. Well, this is the issue.

Speaker 3 The issue is what he lays on George Hodell after the fact. It'd be different.
I honestly think it would be different if he just killed a black doll, yeah, and that was like it.

Speaker 3 Like, if it was just that and he wrote the one book, I'd actually be way more like willing to believe the theory.

Speaker 3 But then it's like eight books later, now it's like he blew up the Hindenburg, he's the Zodiac killer, he's the fucking zebra killer, he shot Abraham Lincoln. Like,

Speaker 3 every single single crime that was around he just applied to his father it's like how little was he around his own dad very little very that is true yeah

Speaker 3 very very little but in the end as much as I admire Steve Hodell's enthusiasm I agree with the many people who say that there's just not enough evidence to make George Odell the one who killed mutilated imposed Elizabeth Short as far as the surrealism angle goes though I'm not going to say that a surrealist artist murdered Elizabeth Short for an art piece but it is possible that surrealist art however unconsciously may have influenced the killer as opposed to being a straight-up inspiration.

Speaker 3 Well, yeah, because we know it was mainstream. Yeah, well, I mean, by the year Elizabeth Short was murdered, it wasn't necessarily mainstream in America, like, but it was still pretty popular.

Speaker 3 They were using it in, like, commercials. It was on, it was in, like, magazines.
It was very fashionable. It's around.
It's mainstream, like, amongst artists, probably. Oh, very much so.

Speaker 3 And they were using it in commercials. Like, Salvador Doli was on television.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, it had certainly stabbed its way into the collective unconscious of the country.

Speaker 3 And it is possible that whoever killed Elizabeth Short may have either seen some surrealist artwork or may have accidentally tapped into surrealist imagery during the murder and the posing of the body.

Speaker 3 Because the similarities between the crime scene and the dozens of surreal art pieces is just too crazy to ignore.

Speaker 3 But there's also, there is, which we're going to get into now, there is a practical stuff. There is practical things that could have happened.

Speaker 3 Mate, well, as far as the bisecting of the body goes, yes. But as far as the posing goes and

Speaker 3 the very specific way in which everything was left.

Speaker 3 Unless you flop a bag down with a body in it and you drag it out by the arms, you leave it one side, you grab out, you have that bag, you put it back in the car.

Speaker 3 You get the other half of the body, come back out, drag it out, flop it there, you're running. You're not even thinking about it.

Speaker 3 You've just dragged it and you've left it, arms open like a wheelbarrow. Maybe?

Speaker 3 Were there like footprints around and stuff? No, they all got destroyed by the reporters and the police. There was one footprint.
Yeah, there was that one.

Speaker 3 There was one footprint, but it didn't match anything that they ever found.

Speaker 3 Well, FBI serial killer criminologist John Douglas Douglas does not think that the Black Dahlia killer is an art lover, nor does he think that our main suspect, Leslie Dillon, is the culprit.

Speaker 3 And this brings us to the next section of our episode, the profile. We're going to nail it down.

Speaker 3 We're getting them. Now, I know some people have problems with John Douglas, but while he can be hit or miss, you have to admit that he does sometimes nail it.

Speaker 3 So his opinion on who might have killed Elizabeth Short at least warrants a listen.

Speaker 3 John Douglas is the guy that mine, like, he wrote Mindhunter, and the TV show was, you know, based on him and so on and so forth. Well, I wanted to hear what he has to say.

Speaker 3 He created modern profiling.

Speaker 3 And so anything that you could say, yes, I don't think he's 100% on the money, but if there's one person that knows and then has researched the criminal mind for 10,000 hours, it is John Douglas.

Speaker 3 So in his profile of the Black Dahlia Killer, John Douglas surmises that the man who murdered Elizabeth Short was white and in his late 20s, possibly older, but possessing no more than a high school education.

Speaker 3 Racist.

Speaker 3 This man lived alone and worked with his hands instead of his brains, possibly as a butcher, slaughterhouse worker, or some other profession where buckets of blood was the norm.

Speaker 3 At the very least, this man might have been a hunter who knew how to field dress a deer. The killer, Douglas continued, was compulsive, patient, rigid, and deliberate in everything he did.

Speaker 3 And when he drank, he was likely to become even more of a difficult person. Because of this, the killer probably had a record for either threatening or assaulting someone with a knife.

Speaker 3 Lastly, the killer probably frequented sex workers and was under a lot of financial and personal stress in the time leading up to the murder.

Speaker 3 As far as how the murder went down, Douglas painted a picture in which the killer and Elizabeth Short spent several days together, days that the killer would have spent drinking.

Speaker 3 At one point, Elizabeth may have rejected his advances or mocked him for some physical or mental disability.

Speaker 3 And when that conflict met the underlying stress and the alcohol, the killer snapped and took out all his rage on Elizabeth.

Speaker 3 As far as Kuttner and Aff went, that was just to make the transport of the body a little easier. Yes.
Which is where we land on almost everybody. Pretty much.

Speaker 3 Most part. Some people still, because this is where he's a surrealist.
Yeah, if you're in the Hodel Camp, then

Speaker 3 her body was cut in half deliberately as a part of the art piece. Yeah.

Speaker 3 But for Douglas and those who subscribe to his profile, the location where Elizabeth's body was found is the single most important clue. This is, I believe this.

Speaker 3 This is my big thing. Okay.
Douglas suggests that the killer, quote, wanted to put the fear of God into the neighborhood in LeMert Park for personal reasons.

Speaker 3 And part of the reason why I agree with this is the old-timey pictures.

Speaker 3 If you go back and look at the Black Dahlia crime scene, one thing that's particularly very interesting about the field is how, literally, how flat it is.

Speaker 3 They said that from that street on a clear day during that time period, 1947, you could see the Hollywood sign.

Speaker 3 And so this thing was flat. This is flat, flat, flat.
It's a canvas. It's literally, and the way it was placed was so obvious.
It was so,

Speaker 3 it was obviously what we've been talking about forever. It was meant to be seen.
Whoever did this wanted people to see it. And it's who is going to see it? Yes, the world, but first, Lement Park.

Speaker 3 As far as personal reasons go, the killer may have been working a construction job in the area that was put on hold, or he could have had an emotional connection that was severed.

Speaker 3 Like if I say he played sports in a field that was bulldozed for new housing developments, he'd be mad at the neighborhood. It's like, basically, this guy is who's mad at the neighborhood? Yeah.

Speaker 3 Or mad at somebody in the neighborhood. Yeah, the t-ball coach.

Speaker 3 He did it. Seems like they were mad at Elizabeth Short.
Yeah, also mad at Elizabeth Short, but mad at the neighborhood as well.

Speaker 3 But no matter what it was, the killer almost certainly had a personal connection to LeMert Park, or specifically that street or that block.

Speaker 3 Additionally, Douglas thinks that the killer's behavior after the body was found would stand out because he would have been anxious about leaving behind evidence or about someone seeing him dump the body.

Speaker 3 His neighbors may have noticed him cleaning his car or his home in a panic. They may have seen him ravenously consuming every piece of media about the murder.

Speaker 3 He would also have been heard ranting about how ineffective the police were in their investigation and about how LeMert Park used to be a safe neighborhood. You see this time and time again.

Speaker 3 Zero killers, more often than not, they're cop groupies. They like to go and they like to hang out.
They go to where the crime happened again and again and again.

Speaker 3 They go and they talk to police that are are actively investigating the crime because they're obsessed with their own crime. And half of them fancy themselves a police officer.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and they also like to hear the cops describe the crime back to them. And they're also trying to see how much information the cops have and if it's possibly running towards them.
Yes.

Speaker 3 But this guy's need to consume information may have inspired him to create his own news stories, which is why he mailed Short's belongings to a newspaper instead of the police and why he communicated with them for a short time afterward.

Speaker 3 Because we still believe that the person who sent the Mark Hanson book and all of her personal effects, if isn't the killer, knows the killer and has access to the killer. Or just found the shit.

Speaker 3 That's the other

Speaker 3 possibility, is that he may have just found it in a trash can and decided to have fun. You know, you just, you really have no fucking idea.
No.

Speaker 3 As far as why there were no more killings in the same style as the Black Dahlia murder, Douglas thinks that the killer removed himself from society by either engaging in a concentrated campaign of self-destruction or by committing himself to a mental institution.

Speaker 3 It's also possible, Douglas thinks, that the killer just drifted away into the darkness after it became apparent that the police were never going to come close to linking him to the murder of Elizabeth Short.

Speaker 3 Now, one of the people who thinks that there's very much something to John Douglas' profile is a former Los Angeles Times reporter named Larry Harnish. We're finally here to Larry Harnish.

Speaker 3 I want to tell you, Larry, you got a good sense of humor already. And listen,

Speaker 3 we're here. We're here.
Yeah. We're here.
We're helping. We're around.
Yeah. And that brings us to the third section of this episode, the actual good suspect.

Speaker 3 Now, author Larry Harnish disputes almost every fact about the Black Dahlia case that's been put forth and says that he has the proof to back up most of his debunks, if not all.

Speaker 3 But he's waiting to release this information until he finds a publisher for his Black Dahlia book, which is totally understandable.

Speaker 3 See, while I'm saving it for the book argument, that might sound a little cagey.

Speaker 3 I'll say that the theory Larry Harnish puts forth as far as who he thinks killed Elizabeth Short is highly compelling.

Speaker 3 I, for one, would absolutely read his book once it gets to a publisher because it does seem like Larry might have the goods to blow the lid off this whole fucking thing.

Speaker 3 He's got two things that I like. Number one is I love his attitude, right?

Speaker 3 He says that Black Dahlia changed his life. He doesn't like true crime.
Hates it. He hates the rest of true crime, but he says that his job is to take, he's trying to take the story, right?

Speaker 3 He's trying to flesh this out fully. Number two.
I kind of love a guy who hates the genre he's in, though.

Speaker 3 I kind of like that. I kind of like that.

Speaker 3 Always. It's like, I didn't expect to be a podcaster.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 And then number two, it's like he says, so yes, all this, he has all this proof that we're waiting to hear on. But I...

Speaker 3 I do think that it's in there because what I know that he does have access to files that are no longer available.

Speaker 3 And he talks about them all the time. And he also says the only actual dependable information that you could tell about the Black Dolly is from the original newspaper clippings.
Of course.

Speaker 3 That makes a lot of sense. And also, it's not like the killer's out there killing people.
You know, it's like the information isn't hurting the world if he keeps it secret for now for his own good.

Speaker 3 So, no. Good on you, Larry.
We just want to find out what the exact details of how he debunks everything. That's what I want to know.
Publish the button.

Speaker 3 Now, as far as how Harnish got into the Black Dahlia scene, he was a copy editor for the Los Angeles Times who got an assignment to write a 50th anniversary story about the Black Dahlia murder in 1997.

Speaker 3 And he soon became obsessed like so many others before and after. I literally don't know what I'm going to do after the series.

Speaker 3 I have been consuming nothing but black dolly information for about a month. It's got you to stop talking about drones, which is wild.
It's the only other thing I can talk about. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Well, so far, Larry Harnish has interviewed 150 people, including people who knew Elizabeth Short personally and members of the Short family. He got everybody.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 As such, Harnish obviously feels quite close to the story and wants to reclaim Elizabeth Short from what he calls the Dahlia freaks. That's me.
I'm a Dahlia freak.

Speaker 3 You better come and punish me, Larry. Oh, you got a problem, Larry? Why don't you come down and give old Henry a spanking? Because I need some discipline.
I'm just a dirty old stinky dahlia freak.

Speaker 3 Side stories, LPOCL.

Speaker 3 Well, you also, I remember, you know why I liked him? One of the first things I liked him is I watched one of his October AMAs, and the first thing he said, he's like,

Speaker 3 I don't want to see a single black Dahlia costume on Instagram. Yeah.
He was like, I don't want to see one. It gets me angry.
Yeah, that's intense. Yeah, oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 Now, when Harnish started looking into the story, he was focused on LeMert Park because he, like John Douglas, believed that the location of the body was the most important clue.

Speaker 3 But after looking into the history of the neighborhood from every possible angle, the most interesting thing about it was that a famous mobster lived just a few hundred feet from where Elizabeth Short's body was found.

Speaker 3 But that was more or less common knowledge by that point.

Speaker 3 But in August of 1997, a filmmaker sent Harnish a box of materials related to the case, and amongst the paperwork was a wedding certificate for Elizabeth Short's older sister.

Speaker 3 When the witness listed for the wedding, her address was 2959 South Norton Avenue, which was exactly one block from where Elizabeth Short's body was found.

Speaker 3 And he said, which I do agree, he was like, this seems to be a key, like this is a big key to this case that we have not seen yet, which is what puts Elizabeth Short anywhere near Lamount Park?

Speaker 3 Like, what puts her there directly? Yeah. And having her older sister be connected to somebody that lives in the very block where she was put is so suspicious.
Yeah. I don't know what to say.

Speaker 3 I mean, it's fucking, it's huge, and it's completely verifiable. Like, this is something there, there is no rumor here.
There's no he said, she said. This is paperwork.
This is a paper trail. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And the witness of a wedding is obviously someone who's incredibly close to the family. Well, they said it was, technically, they said it was whoever they could get, but it was a neighbor.

Speaker 3 It was somebody that they knew.

Speaker 3 It was someone from, it was actually, they went to their church. They went to church together.
Yeah, from Presbyterian people. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Well, as it turned out, this witness was the daughter of a prominent Los Angeles surgeon named Walter Bailey, a surgeon who was well capable of bisecting a body.

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah, because they own the house that the witness lived in. So first thing he's like, all right, who lives at this house? So he found it, it belonged to Walter Bailey, and he was a surgeon.

Speaker 3 Now, that alone doesn't make Walter Bailey a suspect, but when Harnish began looking more into Bailey's story, he found a heretofore undiscovered web of scandal and controversy, which all pointed towards Bailey being the guilty party here.

Speaker 3 See, Bailey was a respected Los Angeles surgeon in the 1930s up until the early 40s, and he had a private practice just five blocks from the Biltmore Hotel.

Speaker 3 That's, like I said, like the little pieces just kind of fill in like bit by bit by bit.

Speaker 3 Because if you'll remember, the Biltmore was the last place that Elizabeth was seen alive.

Speaker 3 But by 1946, Walter Bailey had fallen on relatively hard times, having lost much of his status as a surgeon because he was suffering from early onset Alzheimer's disease and his personality was changing as a result.

Speaker 3 I'll kill!

Speaker 3 I mean, I'll have breakfast.

Speaker 3 Are you my son? No good!

Speaker 3 Bailey was there, therefore, he was under a lot of emotional and financial pressure. That ticks off a big box on John Douglas's profile.
Even more stressful, though, was Bailey's personal life.

Speaker 3 During the time of the Black Dahlia murder, Bailey was in the process of separating from his wife because he'd been having an affair with a fellow doctor. Dude,

Speaker 3 this lady. This doctor had immigrated from Austria during World War II and had become a partner in Bailey's medical practice.

Speaker 3 Now, multiple people said that Walter Bailey had become a totally different person in the last years of his life.

Speaker 3 He actually died not too long after Elizabeth Short was killed, like a little under a year, right? Yes.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and his death certificate listed a condition called encephalomalacia, which might explain quite a bit here.

Speaker 3 This condition, encephalomalacia, effectively shrinks the brain and causes mental impairments that can lead to atypical violence.

Speaker 3 Dude, that's what the wife was saying, that he had changed into somebody else.

Speaker 3 When she was dealing with him, all of a sudden he was, he'd slipped into this early onset dementia and it made him extremely mean. And then, have you seen the pictures of

Speaker 3 Alexandra Partyka? Nuh. Dr.
Partika, his

Speaker 3 let's not get too many names in here.

Speaker 3 I love her. Yeah.
Okay. Oh, the Austrian doctor? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 She was a Nazi doctor? No, he was. No, she was fleeing the Nazis.
Oh, okay. Yeah, she looked evil.
She had an evil face.

Speaker 3 Continue.

Speaker 3 Well, Harnish also spoke to a professor of neurobiology who said that Bailey may have suffered a series of dementia-related mini-strokes that could have resulted in lower impulse control when it came to violent and/or sexual urges, but would not have greatly affected his ability to be an effective surgeon.

Speaker 3 But most interesting is what went down with Walter Bailey's lover.

Speaker 3 See, Bailey changed his will in December of 1947, almost a year after Elizabeth Short was murdered and just before he himself expired. Well, you had to take her out of the will because she was dead.

Speaker 3 That's the thing.

Speaker 3 That's the thing.

Speaker 3 In the change, Bailey disinherited his wife and his adopted children, leaving half of his estate to his siblings and the other half to his Austrian lover. Yes.

Speaker 3 Who may or may not have been controlling Walter when his mental faculties faltered. That's their saying is that maybe he pulls Elizabeth short on there.

Speaker 3 They're playing these weird games with his new hot Austrian evil wife, right? Girlfriend, whatever. This is how you do a C-section.
This is how, yeah, you want to see what happens? Well, it's not.

Speaker 3 That's not what Larry Harnish says. Come on now.
Let's get all in.

Speaker 3 No, there's an entire.

Speaker 3 talk about every every direction. There's a whole other Dr.
Alexander Portyka fucking damn it hole to go down. But Walter hadn't yet divorced his wife when he made this change to his will.

Speaker 3 So his wife started a lawsuit for her share of Walter's estate, claiming that Walter's lover was blackmailing him with a secret that would destroy his life.

Speaker 3 A secret that would be exposed if he ever went back to his family. This isn't, these aren't court filings.
This is, and this is, and this court case was covered in the newspaper.

Speaker 3 Like, it was a fairly big deal. It was a minor story, actually, in Los Angeles at the time, but multiple newspaper stories about this lawsuit.
Yeah, and Austrians love secrets. They do.

Speaker 3 They do. We know that.
We've proved that for a fact. Very much so.
Over little cubby holes.

Speaker 3 Well, but this whole secret-keeping mechanism was why Walter cut her and the kids out of his will. Now, you can go to Larry Harnish's website, lmharnish, that's h-a-r-n-i-s-c-h dot com.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah, yeah, put in the code GRUMPY for 20% off

Speaker 3 to read his theory as to how the murder might have gone down and why Elizabeth Short may have called Walter Bailey from the Biltmore Hotel on January 9th, 1947.

Speaker 3 In fact, you could rent a room in his place, you can stay there and he'll just talk at you all.

Speaker 3 It's called Lair B and B.

Speaker 3 The key, though, is don't even bring up George Hodell because you will be on the street. Yeah.
But the most important thing linking Bailey to Elizabeth Short is the body's location.

Speaker 3 This is and I just can't

Speaker 3 it's the how do you put it? It's the only evidence. It's the only actual evidence that actually points towards an actual suspect.
It is the in terms of that we know something

Speaker 3 about what puts her in that field. So there's one dire there's one investigative direction.
Yes. That is the only one we found.

Speaker 3 Well, going off Douglas' theory that the killer had an emotional connection to the neighborhood, Walter Bailey's wife was living at the house in LeMert Park at the time.

Speaker 3 And it's assumed that Bailey left the body just a block from his wife so he could frighten her and put the fear of God into the neighborhood, as John Douglas put it. And that would fit the profile.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Now, Larry does hold back on quite a few details that I would love to hear explained further.
And

Speaker 3 I truly do believe that he has the goods to back up his claim. You know why I do believe the goods that he has? Because of how much I've listened to him.

Speaker 3 And I've listened to him for hours and hours and hours and hours. And his AMAs, people are just asking random ass questions.
And he's got an answer, he says, I know.

Speaker 3 I like when he says, I don't know, because he doesn't know. I see him saying, I don't know.
He's not just making up answers. And he's also like, he has an answer for everything.

Speaker 3 He says it's all in the book. And it's like, I just want to read the goddamn book.
Yeah. You want to scare your ex-wife, though.
You don't kill another woman.

Speaker 3 That is the true. No, it's flimsy.
But it is as flimsy as the rest of it. Yeah, I don't, like, that's the thing is that, like, it is a connection.

Speaker 3 It's just the motivation is a little like, I don't know.

Speaker 3 It's a little wonky. Yeah.
Like, the motivation. You can break through her window.
Well, this is the thing. You're always talking about the women.
And that's true.

Speaker 3 That's honestly, Eddie, great advice. Yeah.

Speaker 3 You have an ex-wife. Great advice.
Don't kill a woman and leave it in her neighborhood. Just break her windows, scare her a little bit.
Yeah, I think that this is different. But

Speaker 3 this is the problem, right? Is that this is the best one, and it's still not particularly great. I'm still on Leslie Dylan and Markans of Adam.

Speaker 3 And so am I. I mean, that's the thing.

Speaker 3 I really, I want to hear Larry Horness's explanation as to why Walter Bailey would send all the shit to the newspaper, even if he was in a debilitated mental state. It doesn't make a lot of sense.

Speaker 3 It could have been another person threatening him. Or it could, yes, it could be.

Speaker 3 But it could also be held. But who is the soft-voiced man? Like, you know, who called

Speaker 3 before sending the shit?

Speaker 3 Claiming shit, you you know but the thing is but the soft voiced man called and said that he was gonna send shit before he sent the shit so he could still unless what we were saying before that he just knew who did it versus did it or he may have just found the shit and decided to play his own game that's also possible larry hardness which i do sort of agree with i do think a lot of this has to do with that it was a high-profile case and a lot of people are trying to get in on it so there was like people were playing games he thinks that the black dolly avenger was a prankster which i do i think that goes i think that might go too far i I don't know.

Speaker 3 It's a hell of a prank. It is.

Speaker 3 It's the truth. It is.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. See, Ashton Kutcher pulling this shit off.

Speaker 3 The only prank that Ashton Kutcher could pull off was convincing us all that he's a normal human being.

Speaker 3 But as far as why Harnish couldn't get his book published, he thinks that it's because Steve Hodell blew up the Dolly investigation with his book, Black Dolly Avenger.

Speaker 3 Not surprisingly, Harnish does not think much of Hodell and his theories, but the two of them do agree that Leslie Dillon was not the man who killed Elizabeth Short.

Speaker 3 Larry, I'm not trying to be angry with you. It's the fact that the story, the George Odell story, is great for TV.
It's great for TV. It's great for movies.
It's the funnest storyline.

Speaker 3 It's the one with the most fun characters. It's got the most LA history that everybody likes to hear about.

Speaker 3 There was an entire television show that was made about this, the entire fabrication of the George Odell story that even blew that further, even exaggerated it further.

Speaker 3 So that's why they like the George Hodell story, Larry. I think it's York or more correct, but the other one's more fun.

Speaker 3 Well, concerning the Leslie Dylan story, Harnish says that author Pugh Eatwell cherry-picked information to make Dylan look like the only possible killer.

Speaker 3 Harnish believes that Dylan was absolutely in San Francisco at the time of the murder. And he said if Eatwell had talked to him for five minutes, he would have told her so.

Speaker 3 No, Larry, we're answering your calls. Yeah, okay.

Speaker 3 Please bring on the show. We're talking with you about it, man.
All right. It's not like these other people won't.
Yeah, Harnish actually doesn't like any of the Black Dahlia books out there.

Speaker 3 And he has something to say about every single one. Severed by John Gilmore, 25% mistakes and 50% fiction.
Boom, done. Got you.
Black Dahlia Avenger, fabricated crap. Roasted.

Speaker 3 Black Dahlia files, painfully stupid. Coming for him.

Speaker 3 Larry, can I just ask, honestly,

Speaker 3 you didn't do this, right? As a toddler?

Speaker 3 Did you do this as a toddler? Yeah, and personally, I still think Leslie Dillon's a pretty good suspect, despite the problems. And

Speaker 3 I guess maybe I should say that like Mark Hansen is still a really good suspect as far as being involved goes.

Speaker 3 But, you know, I'd love to be proved wrong if there's a more likely story out there, if I could hear all this fucking debunk evidence that Larry Harnish has. I want it.

Speaker 3 But I wonder, like, the main explanation would be: if it is somebody, if it is Walter Bailey, even just in the line of Walter Bailey, right?

Speaker 3 Somebody that he has all the con he could have been in the neighborhood. All he had to do was

Speaker 3 take the Black Dahlia, like see Elizabeth short on the street. Let's say he is now at top of his fugue.
He picks her up for the quote-unquote missing week. She is dead

Speaker 3 in this man's house, like for that week, and then eventually is put outside. Like, she's either refrigerated or there's something else that happens within it.
Can't they tell?

Speaker 3 Don't know. I don't know.

Speaker 3 I don't think, I don't know if they could in 1947. I think they would have been able to tell.
Like, if she was frozen, it'd be different. But if it was a, she must have been someone.

Speaker 3 Her skin would start curling up or some shit yeah if the if the dead body if the body was dead for that long like his neck like a hand's neck he's totally right

Speaker 3 no more bacon leaving the body no more bacons in your black dolly

Speaker 3 no i no her body definitely would have if it would have been if they the most likely thing is um

Speaker 3 quite possibly like if we're talking about walter bailey here that you know she was going through her address book he she just was there for hours trying to call anybody and then just walter bailey was like a name.

Speaker 3 Maybe she had the address of his office written down, which was five blocks from where she was sitting at that moment. So she may have called him up and said, like, hey, you think you can help me out?

Speaker 3 Oh, sure.

Speaker 3 Think maybe you can do something for me. And then, you know, they start hanging out.
They hang out somewhere for days because that's the thing is that.

Speaker 3 Or does he need all of this unless he just sees her, says, I'll give you a ride? That's all you got to do. She's now in his car.

Speaker 3 Like, if she's just five blocks from him, I was saying a motiveless, what we're talking about is a motiveless murder. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And that is the hardest part is that that is what we're looking for in all of this chaos is the whys. Everyone wants to know why.

Speaker 3 We don't even know how. We don't know where.

Speaker 3 Yeah, there's still, and there's, and the connection between, you know, Bailey and Elizabeth Short is that, you know, like Bailey went to his sister, her sister's church.

Speaker 3 So like, you know, he's a well-respected surgeon. So it's, you know, quite possible that Elizabeth Short did know.

Speaker 3 Knew or had, or friends of friends of friends knew. Or at the very least had his address, you You know, maybe his net, maybe his, I don't know, maybe his number.

Speaker 3 But Larry Hardinish is also the one that showed that it's the hardest people to get the information from are the people that actually knew what was happening. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Is that the people that would have answered these a lot of these questions didn't want to. The family were very closely guarded.

Speaker 3 And he said, you just noticed that anybody whose life was actually affected by this crime doesn't want to have anything to do with it.

Speaker 3 But everybody and their mother can't wait to jump in on this story because of just how juicy it is.

Speaker 3 Now, in the end, the thing that makes all this so difficult to piece together is the mystery of Elizabeth Short herself.

Speaker 3 She lied about her life to just about everyone she spoke to, telling people that she was an actress, or a waitress, or a war widow, or a grieving mother, or the grieving mother of a dead child, none of which was true.

Speaker 3 But because we know so little about the facts of Elizabeth herself, it's difficult to put together a narrative.

Speaker 3 And it's especially frustrating by the fact that living memory in this case is just out of the reach of present day.

Speaker 3 The youngest people involved in this now, I think, are in their 80s or 90s, and that's like the paper boy. Oh, man.

Speaker 3 I don't know. I just hopefully that they are really doing well with the congressional hearings coming up, and it's so important for 80-year-olds to have something to do.

Speaker 3 Well, that's why the Black Dahlia murder drives people crazy. Why every person who has a pet theory thinks that everyone else is an idiot? Everybody else is an idiot, fucking dumb-dumb.

Speaker 3 I know what's up.

Speaker 3 And why no one can seem to agree on even some of the most basic facts of the case.

Speaker 3 But if there's a single thing that everyone can agree on, it's that the the history of the Black Dahlia herself will forever remain the most elusive mystery of all.

Speaker 3 And that lost history really is the only thing that could ever put together all the pieces that would give us a clear picture of just who killed Elizabeth Short.

Speaker 3 So we're saying the person that most obfuscated the person who killed Elizabeth Short was her or himself. Yes.
Well. But the person who obfuscated the story the most

Speaker 3 was herself. God help us.

Speaker 3 Because just we can never put together because all of the stories that she told to everybody else like you just can't you have this entire group like you just have it's trying to solve a murder based on a novel about some like a novelization of someone's life yeah you know like it doesn't you can't really you don't know what's true what's not so you can't really follow any sort of investigative lines uh and you can't really make it anywhere because elizabeth herself was not truthful to even her mother even well yeah of course no even her mother yeah how many of us are you truthful to your mother henry i tell tell her how many times I masturbate every week

Speaker 3 but her sisters are friends you know like everybody she told a different story to everybody she knew and

Speaker 3 made it a complete mystery I'm hearing you Marcus we're doing a fifth episode no yeah no I'm hearing you buddy I'm done I'm hearing it no

Speaker 3 we're about to head into some rough waters

Speaker 3 for this next series. Very excited.

Speaker 3 We are extremely sorry that we are not in Atlanta.

Speaker 3 We are currently,

Speaker 3 we are working because we are broken. But we're here in Los Angeles in the center of three different fires.
We're not going anywhere.

Speaker 3 Small. We got a little baby ones.
We got some big ones. We got some baby ones.
They got the sunset one under control. I think it's back to three.

Speaker 3 I just want to say thank you guys for people reaching out, asking us if we're okay. Everybody is so sweet.

Speaker 3 Here's your episode. You got your episode.
So no, we're alive.

Speaker 3 And we're going to continue forward. And I think that this should just show that COVID didn't stop us.
Nope. Nothing stopped.
We're fucking this train goes. This train goes.

Speaker 3 All of the trains don't go. This train goes.
One way or another, we figure it out. This train, and that's what we're going to keep doing.

Speaker 3 We're going to chug a chugga chugga chug all the way through every single piece of tragedy that 2025 is going to give us. This is our version of a fireside chat.

Speaker 3 I am physically warm from the flames. Yes.
Go to patreon.com/slash last lastpodcast on the left to see us be physically warm. We have video episodes available.
You can watch side stories on YouTube.

Speaker 3 You can also follow us on TikTok and Instagram at LPontheleft. Don't forget to check out our Twitch streams at LPNTV.

Speaker 3 They're canceled for the week, but

Speaker 3 they're on there. You can get them on there.
Yeah, twitch.tv slash LPNTV and see all the VOD stuff on YouTube. And don't forget to come out to see us on tour.

Speaker 3 I mean, I know we can't make Atlanta, but we're goddamn going to make it to Texas

Speaker 3 for our show in Dallas. Well, that in Atlanta is postponed.
We will be redoing the show. Oh, hold on to your tickets.
Yes, we're coming right back. We're coming.
Don't worry about it.

Speaker 3 It's definitely going to happen. We're just not leaving our fucking wives behind.
Yeah,

Speaker 3 we're coming back as soon as we can.

Speaker 3 And yeah, don't forget about shows in Toronto, Detroit,

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 Nashville coming up in the next few months. And this shit's going to be good.
I'm so exhausted. I'm about to die.
Can I go home now? You are released. Wonderful job, Marcus.
Really good job,

Speaker 3 both of you as well. Really good stuff, guys.
Thank you. Hail, sweet Satan.
Oh, hell Geen. Hail, Larry, fucking harness.
Hail, Larry.

Speaker 3 Hail.

Speaker 3 10-pound cock on the man. Dude, I want the fucking.
I'm going to buy you lunch. I want to see your dick.
Come on, buddy. We're serious broadcasters.

Speaker 3 We have a New York Times bestseller.

Speaker 3 How about that, Larry? Does that hurt? I know it does. I'm sure it hurts quite a bit.
Fix it, though.

Speaker 3 We're gonna fix it, Larry.

Speaker 3 We're trying.

Speaker 3 We're trying. That's what we're here to do.
We're really trying to make this book deal happen. We want you to get a publisher.
Just Larry, as far as just don't turn like Zionist.

Speaker 3 Just don't do bad shit in the next six months. Just stay under the radar and get that book out.
Just do what most, just talk about only Black Dahlia and be fine. That's it.
Goodbye, Larry.

Speaker 3 Which is what this podcast is about to to become. Yeah.

Speaker 6 Hey Weirdos!

Speaker 7 I'm Elena and I'm Ash and we are the hosts of Morbid Podcast.

Speaker 6 Each week we dive into the dark and fascinating world of true crime, spooky history, and the unexplained.

Speaker 7 From infamous killers and unsolved mysteries to haunted places and strange legends, we cover it all with research, empathy, humor, and a few creative expletives.

Speaker 6 It's smart, it's spooky, and it's just the right amount of weird.

Speaker 7 Two new episodes drop every week, and there's even a bonus once a month.

Speaker 6 Find us wherever you listen to podcasts.

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