The ongoing murder investigation remained on page one of the Los Angeles newspapers for a record thirty-one successive days. The January 16 first-day edition sold more newspapers than any other edition in the history of the Los Angeles Examiner, with the sole exception of VE Day. This Los Angeles frenzy was also driven by the fierce competition among the six newspapers in the city, as the Hearst syndicate, which owned the Examiner and the Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express, vied with the Chandler empire, publisher of the Los Angeles Times and its tabloid the Los Angeles Mirror. Most rounds went to the Los Angeles Examiner, whose night city editor had sent the victim's fingerprints to the FBI for quick identification, thus gaining initial favor with LAPD and the investigating detectives.
In truth, the crime reporters were usually way ahead of the detectives, especially when it came to locating and interviewing witnesses. They didn't punch the time clock at five o'clock, but kept on working until they had the story. Reporters also worked for newspaper owners who had deep pockets and paid whatever it took to get a big story on the streets first. If it meant paying cash to help out a witness who was going through a rough patch, a reporter could always get the money. Then, after he'd called in the story, he'd turn over what he had learned to his friendly detective on the force. Thus both the police and the press had the power to get things done for each other. For the most part they tried to share their findings, but ultimately it was an uneasy partnership.
All of these factors were at work in the Black Dahlia case, to such an extent that the reporting of and publicity about her murder were unparalleled in Los Angeles history. Even the Lindbergh kidnapping or the Leopold and Loeb murder trials had not taken up as much local media space. The public was so voracious for any news that reporters spread out across the nation for background on Elizabeth Short. They located and interviewed her family, close friends and acquaintances, roommates and classmates, ex-lovers, and military men. With few exceptions, almost every detail these crime reporters discovered through their independent investigations, no matter how irrelevant, turned up in print the next day and helped keep the public's seemingly insatiable appetite fed.
After a full month of daily headlines, the Dahlia homicide had found its place as the most notorious unsolved murder of the century.
* It was later speculated that the original source for this name was The Blue Dahlia, a Raymond Chandler-penned murder mystery, starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, released and screened in L.A. in the summer of 1946.
A Death in the Family
May 17, 1999, Bellingham, Washington
WHEN THE PHONE RINGS at one in the morning, you hope it's a wrong number. If it's not, it's usually bad news. And that's what it was for me on Monday, May 17, 1999: a hard ring, an insistent ring that wouldn't go away because my answering machine was off, and it woke me from a deep sleep. June, my father's wife, was hysterical on the other end, screaming into her receiver at their penthouse suite in San Francisco. "Steve," she said, trying to regain some composure, "your father. He's dead!" Between her sobs I could pick up snippets of what had happened. "Heart attack. Paramedics still here. Your brother Duncan and his wife are here with me. Come down. Please come down now. I could have saved him, Steven. I should have done something more. I am all alone now."
When I was an LAPD homicide detective, I taught myself how to wake up instantly in the middle of the night when we had to roll out to a call. It was a skill I'd lost over the years since I retired, but it came back to me as June kept talking. I tried to reassure her that we would take care of things, offering her whatever comfort I could over the phone. "I'll be there on the first flight I can get, June." It was the best I could do. I made coffee and got on the phone to find a seat on the first flight to San Francisco from Seattle, some ninety miles south of my home in Bellingham, where I had been living for the past twelve years.
Eight hours later I was boarding the plane at SeaTac airport, looking forward to two hours of time alone to ruminate upon the passing of "the Great Man." The grief and the loss that I felt, that all sons feel at the death of their father, was mixed with the satisfaction. I had from knowing that his life had been long and remarkable. His life, as much as I knew of it, had been unique, much larger than that of most people I knew. George Hill Hodel, M.D., who seemed to have lived four lifetimes, had been held in awe by all of his children from all four of his families. And now he was gone.
As the plane lifted through the cloud cover and carried me toward the passage that almost all sons must inevitably make (the burial of their fathers), I felt oddly grateful that I had been granted the opportunity to repair a relationship with a father I had never really known. There were only snatches and pieces of memory from my childhood in our mysterious Hollywood house, and then, after he had left, nothing.
Now I was fifty-seven. But my relationship with my father had really begun only eight years earlier. Before that the two of us had been strangers, sharing a hello once in a while over the phone or a handshake now and then when I visited him in Asia or when he was passing through L.A. on business. For thirty-five years there had been brief encounters in hotel lobbies, but ours had never been a real father-son relationship.
What we had had were business meetings, where his stiff and formal demeanor was as offputting to me as it was to all his children. To us, he was the "doctor" — clinical, cold, and remote. It struck me as passing strange that my father, with his brilliant mind and extensive training as a psychiatrist, was so obviously uncomfortable among his children. In lectures, using his vocabulary and wit, he was able to charm and hypnotize whole audiences with his charismatic personality and as a leader in his field. Yet in the role of father he was painfully awkward and inept. This paradoxical disconnect, however, actually gave life and body to the eccentricities that made him a distant legend to all of his children. And I was no exception, having lived in the same house with my father in Hollywood in the late 1940s and then twenty-five years later spending time with him in the Philippines when he wanted to woo me away from LAPD Homicide and groom me to take over his business. But that was more than twenty years ago.
Over the ensuing decades, after my retirement and a subsequent career as a P.I. specializing in criminal cases, I had begun to make a breakthrough into the mystery of my father. Slowly, gradually, since his return to the United States in 1991 after a forty-year absence, I had established the beginnings of a relationship with him. I was almost fifty and he was eighty-four.
I believe my change of career had helped us in some ways. I knew that he had on occasion worried about my personal safety. But now I was no longer the metropolitan homicide detective waiting for the midnight callout to a Hollywood murder. No more six o'clock news interviews with the L.A. press reporters who wanted to be assured that "an arrest is imminent." Those glory days were behind me now. I liked retirement. I liked my new work as a P.I. I liked the fairness of it all. It had been twenty-four years for the prosecution and almost fourteen years for the defense. A recent major victory for an innocent client was still reverberating through my psyche. My life was moving toward a natural homeostatic balance. And now, seeing my face reflected in the airplane window at 35,000 feet against a cloudscape so thick you were sure you could walk on it, that balance was upset and all I could feel was a hole where the past had been. I kept picturing my father over the years: the young 1920s crime reporter, the bohemian artist, the silky-voiced radio announcer, the meticulous surgeon, the austere but dominating psychiatrist, and finally the entrepreneurial marketing genius who had moved to Asia in 1950, abandoning all of us.