The Black Dahlia murder case is one of the famous unsolved murders from Hollywood, but does it finally have a solution? Steve Hodel, a former LAPD homicide detective thinks his father committed the murder.
It doesn’t come as too big a shock to him. His father, George Hodel, was a prime suspect in the 1947 murder. He was eventually booked in 1949 for incest and child molestation.
Hodel recently spoke to a Pasadena audience explaining the evidence he had against his father.
Elizabeth Short was one of the many young women who came to Hollywood looking to be an actress. In January 1947, the 22-year-old woman was murdered in Leimert Park in Los Angeles. Her body had been sliced in half at the waist and drained of blood. It was a gruesome killing that attracted a lot of attention then and in the years since, but it has remained unsolved.
Steve Hodel says that his father once told him, “What if I did kill the Black Dahlia? They can’t prove it now.’”
He also says that the handwriting in letters written by Short’s killer match his father’s handwriting. He also found a receipt for cement bags that he believes were found at the crime scene.
The police have long thought that the murderer was someone with medical knowledge due to the precision with which she had been cut.
George Hodel was a doctor and with that medical knowledge, he also carved a symbol in Short’s hip that Steve Hodel believes he can link to an artist friend of his father’s.
Over the years, other theories have been posited for a solution to the crime. It has been suggested that murders in 1934 and 1938 in Cleveland may have been committed by the same man. Another theory connects the murder to the 1946 murder of Suzanne Degnan in Chicago.
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