But my rage was short-lived, quickly overtaken by the enormity of what I had discovered in my father's photo album. First, those two photographs of Elizabeth Short appeared to be more or less contemporary with other photos of her just prior to her disappearance and murder. In both pictures her eyes were downcast and closed. It was clear that she had agreed to be posed this way. But why had Father kept these two photographs for more than fifty-two years in an album, where Elizabeth Short held a place of honor with the rest of those he loved?
Fragments of memory started to fit together. I remembered his overwhelming need to dominate and assert control, especially when it came to the many women in his life. He had left each of them in turn: first Emilia, then Dorothy Anthony, then my mother, whom he nicknamed "Dorero," and then his wife in the Philippines, before he finally settled down with June. He had obviously controlled June, who now seemed completely incapable of taking care of herself.
I knew there might be, and doubtless were, perfectly innocent answers to all of my questions. He could have known Elizabeth Short in the weeks or months before her murder and even taken the photographs of her. Maybe they had even been lovers, which Father had never revealed after she was murdered because he was afraid of becoming a suspect for a crime he didn't commit. There were, I was sure, rational answers to all my questions, and I determined to be objective in resolving them. I could not allow my emotions to come into play.
What would I do as a private investigator if a client came to me with a similar set of circumstances? How would I proceed? The obvious answer: handle it just like I had all of the other homicide investigations I had conducted during my career. It would require a simultaneous, two-pronged strategy: a thorough background check into all available information on the possible suspect, and a parallel check on the victim. There was a lot I didn't know. First, what was Father's real background? I knew generalities, but few specifics. What could I discover about his activities over fifty years ago? Who was left to tell the story? Could I find witnesses and records? What was still available?
I needed to figure out just how much June knew about her husband. I remembered her response when I asked her who the woman was in the two pictures. "Just someone your father knew from a long time ago." She only spoke of Father as a loving, compassionate man.
But June surely would have known something about Father's earlier life. He must have shared with her at least some of his experiences in their long years together. She could help me in my background search, help plot a timeline of his life. My questioning of his past would not be a form of interrogation, but would come from my sincere desire to know the man. If she sensed or suspected that I was looking for something more than that, I knew I would get nothing from her. My search must proceed slowly, with great caution.
The second approach was to find out all I could about the real Elizabeth Short, not just the newspaper creation named the Black Dahlia. I had to track her movements through Los Angeles and California as far back as I could, to connect her to the murderer through mutual friends, relatives, or surviving witnesses. Maybe there was still some physical evidence. Maybe I could find fingerprint evidence or even come up with a DNA match.
I began my investigation by reviewing everything that was publicly known and available, including every old newspaper article, magazine, and book. But I was at a disadvantage relative to my other homicide investigations, because I had not been at the crime scene, nor could I review the investigative notes of the officers who had. I also did not have access to the LAPD homicide file, called a "murder book," that is started on every murder in Los Angeles. I was no longer an active detective, simply one of thousands of retired L.A. cops, so I would not benefit from any of the special privileges, free access, or any of the other door-openers that came from carrying a badge and a gun. But I also knew I had a lot going for me on this one. I had a real advantage: a hot lead in the form of two pieces of evidence that quite possibly had never surfaced in the original investigation.
On June 2, 1999, June Hodel carried out her husband's final instructions. Holding in her lap a green urn containing the ashes and sole worldly remains of the man she had loved for thirty years, she cried as the small ocean craft, the Naiad, powered through the fog, passing under the Golden Gate Bridge. A mile more and it was finished. Father's ashes cast to sea, his body returned to the elements. She called me in Bellingham early that afternoon to inform me it was accomplished, just as he had instructed her, alone and without ceremony or words.
At the same time June was scattering Father's ashes, I was setting off to see what I could discover about his mysterious past. I was confident that if I looked long and hard enough, I would find answers to the many questions that were nagging me.
My initial search for information about Elizabeth Short on the Internet would eventually be expanded to include personal interviews with some of Dad's friends and acquaintances from that time, along with my own family members, some of whom I had not spoken to in many years. I would read published statements of credible witnesses who claimed to have actually seen Elizabeth Short in the week she had been presumed missing. Additional interviews with witnesses in Los Angeles would provide me with some actual physical evidence, which, I believe, relates to the crime. Eventually, I would review hundreds of archival microfilm articles from all the major newspapers of that time and request and receive FOIA material, including the complete dossier on Elizabeth Short, which included FBI interviews of 1947 witnesses and her associates.
In order to put the case in a historical context, I read the three most relevant published books on the Dahlia case: Severed, by John Gilmore (1994), Daddy Was the Black Dahlia Killer, by Janice Knowlton and Michael Newton (1995), and Childhood Shadows, by Mary Pacios (1999). I later read James Ellroy's The Black Dahlia, even though it is a work of fiction, because Ellroy based it on fact, using some real names. I felt it was important to review each of these authors' theories and evidence, to determine if any of them had a real suspect.
After carefully reviewing the contents of each book I can say with authority that none of the three nonfiction works provide any hard evidence pointing to a viable suspect. The authors' conjectures and efforts at building circumstantial cases against their three separate suspects are exceptionally weak, devoid of any physical evidence linking them to the murder. Mary Pacios's book was the most helpful to me as I began my investigation, because her extensive documentation of sources and references permitted me to check and recheck many of the facts I had discovered through my own investigation.
Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the Black Dahlia case is the many distortions of fact that have surrounded the few kernels of truth from the very beginning of the 1947 investigation.
The LAPD's official position on the murder of Elizabeth Short is that the case remains "open." Though it may be a cold case — one in which there has been no activity for decades — it remains on the books and is handed off to one of the division's newest transferees into Robbery-Homicide. As far as the public is concerned, the LAPD, after interviewing hundreds of witnesses and spending thousands of man-hours, is no closer now to identifying any suspect(s) than it was after the first few months of intensive searching, which back in 1947 involved a thousand Southern California lawmen.