Tamar was stunned at hearing her daughter's disclosure. Now, she thought, with Fauna 2's supportive testimony, maybe Tamar's mother would believe her. But it was not to be. "We both went to my mother and told her the story, thinking that finally it might make her believe the truth of what happened to me back at the Franklin House," Tamar told me. "Well, she didn't believe either one of us, and said she never wanted to see either of us again. She refused to believe her granddaughter just as she refused to believe her daughter." To this day, Fauna 2 told her mother, she "still hopes that the truth about what happened to her in that hotel room with her grandfather would be believed." As for Tamar, since her truth has been buried for more than fifty years, I suspect she has by now given up all hope of ever being vindicated.
Joe Barrett and the Franklin Years
In early 1948, a year after the murder of Elizabeth Short, a talented twenty-year-old artist named Joe Barrett rented the studio at the north end of the Franklin House, became friends with my father, and lived in the studio through the entire incest trial. Even after the family broke up when Dad left the country, Joe remained a good friend to my mother and kept in touch with her through the years, whenever he could find our gypsy encampment in L.A. He and my mother remained good friends until her death in 1982.
Joe and I saw each other only a few times during my years in the LAPD and we lost touch after I retired and moved to Washington State. But he had kept in occasional contact with my brother Kelvin in Los Angeles. And when the time came for me to talk to him about the past, it was through Kelvin that I was able to reach him in 1999, shortly after my father's death and at the early stages of my investigation.
Joe was an important window to the past. He was a young adult living there right at the time of the rape and the trial, the DA's investigation into my father's behavior, and the comings and goings of Man Ray. In the same way that I approached my interviews with Tamar, I did not tell him I was conducting an investigation. I merely talked with him in the hope of gaining deeper understanding about a father I had just lost and wanted to know more about. I told him I wanted to get an accurate picture of my father as he really was, as Joe knew him from the Franklin years.
Barrett's insights were astonishing, because in addition to providing me with detailed descriptions of Dad, he also informed me, long before I discovered it through my own independent sources and research, that he himself was officially solicited by the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office to assist them in their investigation of my father as "the prime suspect in the Black Dahlia murder." I would discover through my interviews with Joe Barrett that in early 1950, Barrett was picked up by the DA's detectives, taken to their office, and actively solicited to be their mole inside the Franklin House — "to be their eyes and ears there" was how they put it — in their effort to establish that Dr. Hodel was indeed the Black Dahlia Avenger.
The Trial
Joe's was an intimate view of the activities at the Franklin House for almost two years, from 1948 to 1950. He told me that Father was gifted with a perfect photographic memory that permitted him to absorb ideas from other people and make them sound as if they were his own. He was super intelligent, but not particularly original.
Joe was not an invitee to my father's parties, but he saw a lot of human traffic going through the house and lots of heads bobbing around in that large middle room between the living room and Dad's bedroom. These were parties, he said, where there was a great deal of intense sexuality and there were lots of people in attendance. Joe reminded me that my father's venereal disease clinic on First Street downtown was also frequented by lots of important people. These were the days before modern drugs, when venereal disease was rampant and those who could afford private treatment were very dependent on the doctors who could provide it. My father was one of those doctors.
Barrett told me that he also knew Man Ray, who was often at the Franklin House. Joe saw him there the last day Man Ray was in Hollywood. He came to visit Dad, and he also visited Joe in the studio, where they talked for an hour or so. Joe said, "Man Ray was leaving town that day, probably going back to Europe, after the shit hit the fan, at the end of' 49 or maybe it was into 1950. He and Juliet were living over by the Hollywood Ranch Market." The trial had just concluded, and though Dad had been acquitted everyone in his circle had fallen under the scrutiny of the district attorney. Man Ray's reputation was already such that he did not want to be caught in the web. He must also have been doubly concerned that Tamar might reveal that he had taken nude photographs of her at the Franklin House, or that the prints had been discovered by the police.
Another of Dad's acquaintances, and Man Ray's as well, was the novelist Henry Miller, whom Joe remembered seeing talking to Father in his library. The Franklin House had become, in those days, almost like a salon, where artists flouting convention and social mores gathered around my father, who had the means to entertain them.
Joe told me, "Tamar had named so many names to the district attorney that lots of people got arrested." Even my father's close friend Fred Sexton was offered a deal by the DA if he would testify against George and his relationship with Tamar. But, Joe told me, "Man Ray was somehow kept off the list of witnesses." Joe said that Dad's defense attorneys, Giesler and Neeb, had cost him a fortune, and that to raise the needed money he had to sell all of his rare and imported art objects. "I remember that a well-known jockey of the time named Pearson bought most of George's artwork," he told me.*
The Black Dahlia Murder
Joe Barrett remembered that a Dr. Ballard was arrested for performing the abortion on Tamar. He was acquitted, partly because of my father's acquittal and because of the credibility of Tamar's testimony. Out of the blue Barrett also said, "Did you know that your dad was a suspect in the Black Dahlia case? I know that for a fact. She had been murdered a year or so before I moved into the Franklin house. From what I heard, your dad had apparently known her."
After the trial, when Joe was picked up by the DA investigators and taken to their office downtown, "they were really pissed," he remembered. "'God damn it, he got away with it!' they exclaimed, referring to the Tamar trial, adding 'We want this son of a bitch. We think he killed the Black Dahlia.' I'm sure it was investigators from the district attorney's office and not LAPD. They wanted me to spy on George for them. I remember one of the DA investigators was a man named Walter Sullivan. I think these investigators also tried to get a couple of gals that George knew to spy on him and report back to them."
Joe was also present when the police served a search warrant on Dad at the Franklin House after he was arrested for incest. "Thad Brown was out there standing around at the house with these DA investigators. I remember him from the newspapers. He was a police big shot back then."
Duncan Hodel's Memories of the Franklin House
I was stunned by my conversations with Tamar and Joe Barrett. Their incredible revelations about what went on at the Franklin House around the time of Elizabeth Short's murder, and in the following two years, filled in many of the blank spots in my own life during that period.
Encouraged by what I had gained from Tamar and Joe Barrett, I decided to pursue a third source.