george hodel
Before his own death in 1999, George Hodel accumulated the life experiences of 10 successful men. Born in 1907, the only child of George Hodel, Sr. and Esther Hodel, he was a musical prodigy with an IQ of 187 that reportedly stood a point above Albert Einstein’s.
By the age of nine, he was performing as a solo pianist at the Shrine Auditorium and entertained, in private session, for famed Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff in the living room of his grandparents’ home in Pasadena.
George Hodel, whose childhood home still sits on Monterey Road on the edge of South Pasadena, graduated from South Pasadena High School in 1923, at age 14, and entered the California Institute of Technology. He was expelled from the university after confessing to having an affair and impregnating the wife of a faculty member.
Still a teen at the time, he tracked down the woman on the East Coast, only to be told he had ruined her life and to go away. Forever.
George Hodel went on to become a self-employed magazine publisher (his works focused on death); a cab driver in downtown LA; a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Record; a radio announcer for the Southern California Gas Company, introducing Angelenos to classical music; a medical student in San Francisco; a cab driver in San Francisco; a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle; a division head in the LA County Health Department, the county’s venereal disease control officer; and the owner of a private health clinic.
Tamar Nais Hodel, Steve Hodel’s older half-sister, came to live for a time at the Sowden House with her father and half-brothers. Her mother and George Hodel’s ex-wife, Dorothy Anthony, also stayed for a time.
“My father took avant-garde to the hilt, and the women went along with it,” Tamar said in an interview published in DuJour Magazine in 2015, shortly before her death at age 80. “But it was hidden.”
Tamar, then 14 years old, ran away from the Sowden House on Oct. 1,1949 and soon was arrested by police. When questioned about her reasons for running away, Tamar told police it was because of the sex parties at home. When asked how she knew about the parties, she admitted to having taken part in several.
She also detailed how she had been molested by her father since the age of 11. And that she had become pregnant after having sex with her father, another man and a woman. Her father, she said, arranged for an abortion for her shortly before she ran away.
When the District Attorney’s office interrogated George Hodel, according to a news article at the time in the Los Angeles Daily News, he responded: “Everything is a dream to me.”
He also mustered a defense based on possibly being in a state of hypnosis at the time, making it hard for him to know what was real and what was imagined, the stuff of surrealism. “If this is real and I am really here, then these other things must have happened,” he added.
To bolster his case, George Hodel hired prominent attorneys Jerry Giesler and Robert Neeb, known for getting celebrities out of trouble.
Three adults testified during the scandalous three-week trial in 1949, making newspaper headlines at the time. All supported Tamar’s accusations. Despite the witnesses and the initial admissions by George Hodel himself, the doctor to the stars was acquitted.
It’s in the months following the trial that the Sowden House was bugged by the DA’s office investigating the Black Dahlia murder, gleaning audio recordings of questionable conversations, as well as the screams of a woman being beaten, the sounds likely emanating from the basement.
George Hodel is heard on tape giving another man the instruction, “Leave no trace.”
A Los Angeles newspaper soon quoted anonymous sources saying that the police planned an imminent arrest of a suspect in the Black Dahlia case.
Dr. George H. Hodel then fled the City of Angels.
In the ensuing years, George Hodel rebuilt a professional and personal life abroad.
He first moved to Hawaii, before it was a state, and served as a staff psychiatrist at Kaneohe Territorial Hospital, chief of the psychiatric clinic at Oahu Prison, and a lecturer at the University of Hawaii. By 1952, he married Hortensia Laguda, his fourth wife, with ties to the Philippine government and with whom he would have four children. George Hodel would later move to the Philippines.
He would return to Los Angeles only intermittently and usually without notice. Steve Hodel remembers the surprise visits as clinical: His father would often ask each of the brothers to take 10-minute turns catching him up on their lives since he last saw them.