George Hill Hodel

George Hill Hodel (October 10, 1907 – May 17, 1999) was an American physician, and a prime suspect in the 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short, also known as the Black Dahlia. He was initially considered a viable suspect but never formally charged with the crime and police ultimately cleared him after several weeks of investigation. However, two of Hodel's children believe he was guilty of killing Short. Hodel was also charged with the rape of his daughter, Tamar Hodel, but was acquitted of that crime. He lived overseas several times, primarily in the Philippines between 1950 and 1990.

Early life George Hill Hodel Jr. was born on October 10, 1907, in Los Angeles, California, the only son of George Hodel Sr. and Esther Hodel ( Leov), who were Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire. Hodel was well-educated and highly intelligent, scoring 186 on an early IQ test. He was also a musical prodigy as a pianist.

At a young age Hodel was sent to Paris and was enrolled in the Montessori school, run by Anna Montessori. He later attended South Pasadena High School and graduated early, at age 15. Hodel enrolled at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, but was forced to leave the university after one year, due in part to a sex scandal involving a professor's wife. He had impregnated the woman and wanted to raise their child together, but she refused. The affair between Hodel and the woman caused her marriage to fall apart.

By around 1928, Hodel was in a common-law marriage with a woman named Emilia, and they had a son, Duncan. In the 1930s, Hodel was legally married to Dorothy Anthony, a fashion model from San Francisco, with whom he had a daughter, Tamar.

Hodel graduated from Berkeley pre-med in June 1932. Immediately afterward, he enrolled in the medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, and received his medical degree in June 1936. he was living with "Dorero" and their three children, as well as his first legal wife, Dorothy Anthony, and their daughter Tamar and, at times, his original common-law wife, Emilia, the mother of Hodel's eldest child, who was an adult by that time.

Murder and rape suspect

On January 15, 1947, the naked body of 22-year-old Elizabeth Short was discovered in an empty lot in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. Short had suffered gruesome mutilation: her body had been bisected at the waist, and her mouth was cut ear to ear. The case earned major publicity and prompted one of the largest investigations in the history of the Los Angeles Police Department. The case was never solved. Authorities at the time interviewed hundreds of suspects and focused seriously on about 25, including Hodel. However, police investigation of Hodel was not known publicly until decades later.

In late 1949, Hodel's teenage daughter Tamar accused him of incestuous sexual abuse and impregnating her. He was acquitted after a widely publicized trial. Two witnesses to the alleged abuse testified at the trial. A third recanted her earlier testimony and refused to come forward, with one theory being George threatened her into silence.

Hodel came to police attention as a suspect in the Elizabeth Short murder in 1949 after the sexual abuse trial. Known or suspected sex criminals were being investigated for the Short case, and it had also come out in that trial that Tamar had allegedly claimed her father was the Dahlia killer. She denied the claim during the 1949 trial, but years later said she had actually believed her father was a murderer. went on to name a man called "GH", identifying GH as a personal acquaintance of Martin and an LAPD detective. Martin also alleged GH was the killer of both Short and Springer, but claimed GH was being protected by high ranking officials. In later years, Steve Hodel claimed to have found eight persons who said George was acquainted with Short.

A September 2006 episode of Cold Case Files, hosted by Bill Kurtis, illustrates the mixed reaction to Steve Hodel's hypothesis as outlined in his first book Black Dahlia Avenger (2003). Head Deputy District Attorney Stephen Kay described himself as highly impressed by Steve Hodel's research and conclusions and even went so far as to declare the case had been solved. Less impressed was active Detective Brian Carr, the LAPD officer then in charge of the Black Dahlia case, which was still officially open. Carr's opinion was that Hodel's theory was based on a few intriguing facts linked together by unsubstantiated supposition. Short's relatives also disagreed that the photos in Hodel's album were of Short. Carr added that if he ever took a case as weak as Steve Hodel's to a prosecutor he would be "laughed out of the office". Carr, admitting that he had not read all of Steve Hodel's materials, added, "I don't have the time to either prove or disprove Hodel's investigation. I am too busy working on active cases." Steve Hodel has since produced two additional books on the Dahlia case, and several books on the Zodiac Killer and other cases, attempting to link them to his father.

Author William J. Mann in his 2026 book on the Short case argues the main flaw in seeing Hodel as a murder suspect was the lack of unambiguous evidence or testimony from credible witnesses that he ever met Short, whose activities and associates during her final months in Los Angeles are very well documented. There was only a brief period of six to eight weeks in late 1946 when Short and George Hodel could have possibly met, but Short's social life was busy with numerous dates and brief relationships with at least six young men during her time in Los Angeles. Mann also argues the allegation that Hodel killed Short originated with, or was promoted by, Hodel's own defense attorneys, who used the allegation as a means to smear the reputation of Tamar during the rape trial by attempting to depict her as a pathological liar. a Cadence13/TNT production using archival audio and interviews with Hodel family members. The podcast includes many of the actual investigative findings and claims linkage of George Hodel to the Black Dahlia murder.

Both series surmise that Fauna might be both the granddaughter and the daughter of Hodel, though there is no evidence of her father's identity. In 1949, George Hodel had been arrested and tried for incest by LAPD; his 14-year-old daughter Tamar accused him of raping her, resulting in a pregnancy she aborted. Hodel obtained criminal defense attorney Jerry Giesler and was acquitted after a three-week jury trial.

The Root of Evil producer Zak Levitt was able to obtain DNA analysis and a review of the results by a prominent expert, which positively eliminated George Hodel as the biological father of Fauna Hodel.

There was also a twenty-minute segment summarizing all these different theories, on the Discovery Channel documentary series The Expedition Files hosted by Josh Gates, on April 23, 2025.