Sexton made an application to the Social Security Administration on May 23, 1939, listing his place of employment as "Columbia Pictures Corp., 1438 N. Gower Street, Hollywood, California," and at that time he gave his residence as White Knoll Drive in the Elysian Park district of Los Angeles, just a mile from downtown. The house is still owned by his surviving first wife.
Sexton died at eighty-eight, on September 11, 1995, in Guadalajara, Mexico. All I knew about the man was what I had been told by Tamar and Joe Barrett. Now it was time to see what Sexton's own surviving relatives could tell me.
I spoke to Sexton's daughter in two separate meetings, the first of which took place in Los Angeles in October 1999. At that time I was in no position to confront her with any suspicions I harbored about her father and his possible criminal involvement with mine. In the spring of 2000, five months after our initial meeting, Sexton's daughter mailed me two photographs of Fred, which she told me had been taken in Los Angeles in the mid-1940s. In this mailing, she also included pictures of herself shown playing with an eight- or nine-year-old Tamar. She was three years older than Tamar, and they were friends from the early 1940s until Tamar's arrest and detention in 1949. She had known Kiyo during the time Dad was having an affair with her, and the pictures she sent me were, ironically, taken shortly after their "breakup," and showed the two children playing in front of Kiyo's beachside home in Venice.
I contacted her again in August 2001, informed her I was now living in Los Angeles, and scheduled a second interview to meet her at her home, telling her I had some important information to discuss. At this meeting, realizing that what I was about to tell her would be very similar in effect to the many death notifications I had made to family members during my long career in Homicide, and knowing she would need some emotional support, I requested that her husband be present, and she agreed. I opened our conversation with the shocking revelation that, based on my two-year investigation, it was my professional opinion that our fathers had been crime partners and had committed a series of abductions and murders of lone women in Los Angeles during the mid- to late 1940s. I informed her that all of my research and investigation was well documented, that the full story would be revealed in a book I was writing. I did not provide her with the names of any victims and was circumspect in my references to the crimes. Specifically, I did not indicate that the case focused on Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia.
Understandably, Sexton's daughter was profoundly shocked by my news. She found it difficult to believe that her father could ever have been involved in such violent crimes. She doubted my assertion that he, like my father, was a practicing sadist. Even though she acknowledged that he was a controlling person, she felt he was incapable of physically harming women to that extent.
In this interview, she disclosed a wealth of information. She was specific and provided much deeper insight into her father's personality and character, underscoring and increasing the probability that he was in fact the partner-in-crime of his close friend George Hodel.
Mary Moe
"Mary Moe," which is the name I have given Sexton's daughter to protect her identity, was sixty-five at the time of our first conversation. She had known our family since before I was born, and in another incredible twist of fate, as an eight-year-old girl had come with her father to the hospital to visit my mother on the day my twin brother John and I were born.
Fred Sexton was of Irish, Jewish, and Italian descent. When he was about thirteen years old, the police arrested his father on Christmas Eve and dragged him out of the house, an incident that instilled in Fred a lifelong hatred of the police. The family was then living in California, but his dad had been bootlegging in Nevada during the '20s and '30s.
Sexton had been John Huston's close friend at high school in L.A., and they remained friends through the years. As a child, Mary remembered Huston as a kind of "godfather" who would suddenly appear with extravagant presents for her, then vanish. Mary also thought her father had been acquainted with the notorious gambler Tony Cornero, but was not absolutely sure. She did know that Fred's father had been a gambler and bootlegger like Cornero.
I learned that, like my father, Sexton had a secret and mysterious past and had concealed important early truths from his daughter. For instance, from her mother Mary discovered that her father had had an affair with a married newspaper reporter in San Francisco in the 1920s. The newswoman became pregnant and gave birth to a son. Growing up, Mary was shown pictures of a small, dark-complexioned boy, and was told these were pictures of her father. Only as an adult did she learn the truth: the pictures were not of her father but her half-brother! To this day she knows nothing further about him, has never met him, does not know if he is living or dead, nor does she even know his name.
She remembered that her father ran a "floating crap game" in Los Angeles, where he reportedly "made very good money." Like my Father, Fred drove taxis during his youth, both in Los Angeles and in San Francisco.
Regarding Sexton and his women, Mary told me, "My dad had lots of different girlfriends when I was young. He was very much like your father when it came to women. He had so many women, one after the other."
In the early 1930s, Sexton went to Europe for a year or two, then returned to Los Angeles, married Gwain, and Mary was born. He pursued his artwork, gained some notoriety, and reportedly had several one-man shows, which received excellent reviews from L.A. art critics.
Mary recalled that in 1938 George Hodel moved into the house next door to theirs. "We were neighbors on White Knoll for about a year," she recalled. It was at that time, Mary said, that the two Dorothys were living together with George. "Both Tamar's mother, Dorothy Anthony, and your mom were living with him next to us. Then, after about a year, the three of them moved not far away, to Valentine Street."
During the war years Sexton, like my father, remained in Los Angeles:
My dad was working at all the movie studios and he worked at the shipyards, then he drove a cab again in '43 and '44. My dad wasn't in the war because he had to take care of my mom, who was bedridden for many years. Your dad, who had known my mom and was a good friend for so long, also treated her and was her doctor.
Fred Sexton had an art studio in a downtown building, at 2nd and Spring Streets. I learned from Mary that my father had an apartment on the top floor of the same building, where they could go upstairs onto the roof of a German beer-hall. According to her, this apartment was where George would "rendezvous" with all his girlfriends. Mary had been inside George's "apartment" with her father on one occasion around 1948, and remembered that the interior was beautiful and, in her words, had a "very fancy decor."
I asked if she had any information or remembered an incident related to a woman, possibly a girlfriend of my father's, who had committed suicide during those years. Her response was:
I think that the person you are talking about was your dad's office manager at the First Street Clinic. I'm not sure of her name, but it might have been Ruth Dennis. What I heard was that she didn't come to work one morning at the clinic, and your dad went to her apartment and found her dead. As I recall, it was a suicide, an overdose.
Then Mary related a telling incident, which again involved both of our fathers.