Los Angeles’ 1943-1950 “Black Dahlia Avenger” and Lone Woman Serial Crimes Linkage to 1967-68 San Francisco “Zodiac” Serial Crimes–THE WHY

March 14, 2024
Birch Bay, Washington 

Some Comments from Non-Readers of Author Steve Hodel’s Books:

“According to Steve Hodel, his dad, George Hodel, started his serial murders as a teen and never stopped. He is now claiming his dad killed like fifty people in fifty years.”

“Now he says his father is Zodiac. Where’s he going next, the Grassy Knoll in Dallas?”

“I was on board with him on the Black Dahlia Murder, but when he claimed his dad was Zodiac,that’s when he lost me.”

OK. Let me once again set the record straight and separate fact from fiction regarding my writings, which now total a dozen (12) books.

Let’s start with my investigation into the 1968-69 Zodiac Murders.

As in all of my investigations, I simply followed the evidence to where it took me, and George Hodel’s crime signatures pointed the way. All signs (pun intended) pointed to Zodiac. His 1967 Manila Philippines murder and placement of victim Lucila Lalu’s surgically bisected body on a vacant lotoff a street named Zodiac literally pointed the way.

Initially, I said to myself, “No way.” George Hodel was too old to be Zodiac.” But then I discovered the star eye-witness in the Zodiac investigation, SFPD officer Donald Fouke’s revised statement of having seen Zodiac (truth be told, he and his partner, officer Zelm, actually stopped and talked to him) with Fouke’s description of a suspect in his “mid-forties.” This led me to the revised additional Zodiac police composites drawn from witness interviews using professional artists were picture-perfect to George Hill Hodel.

The result of that initial investigation led to the ongoing progress report and publication of Most Evil: Avenger, Zodiac, and the Further Serial Murders of Dr. George Hill Hodel (Dutton 2009). In that publication, I did not claim that GHH was Zodiac but merely presented the evidence and said, “Law Enforcement needs to compare their existing DNA to George Hodel’s, of which I had a full profile in my possession.” (Fifteen years have now passed and so far crickets from LE.)

Most Evil I’s publication led to the further startling linkage by Frenchman Yves Person, a high school teacher in Paris, France, who cracked the code on a legitimate Zodiac cipher and revealed it was an ancient Celtic alphabet known as Ogham, and it contained five letters which spelled the word
H O D E L. I then, some six years later, I published Most Evil II: Presenting the Follow-up Investigation and Decryption of the 1970 Zodiac Cipher in Which the San Francisco Serial Kill Reveals His True Identity (Rare Bird Books 2015). 

I will not here attempt to summarize all the Zodiac linking as presented in Most Evil II other than to say that the fact is George Hodel in the late-Sixties, reinvented himself from “Black Dahlia Avenger” (the name he created for himself in the 1940s) and once again terrorized California with serial crimes and taunting “clews” after creating a new public persona, calling himself, “Zodiac”. In ME II I provide thirty-two unusual crime signatures linking “Avenger” to “Zodiac”.

Transitioning now to The Early Years Parts I and II, I do present twenty-five serial crimes spanning twenty-three years. (1921-1944)

As seen in the above Introduction to both books I claim no “solution” to any of the crimes presented. I present the evidence and let you, the reader, be judge and jury and decide for yourself on each separate murder.

Finally, in response to one particular naysayer, who, in his own words, is a “wannabe literary person” and has been promising to reveal his own theory of whodunit in a book he has been writing for the past twenty-seven years. A man who has been spewing his hatred and jealousy in repeated attacks on my personal and professional abilities for more than twenty years. And most recently, he claims he talked to LAPD and “the boys downtown,” and Hodel has a reputation of being a pariah on the LAPD.” I will simply answer with my bi-annual LAPD Rating Reports from my seventeen years at Hollywood Homicide Division, along with a letter from LAPD Chief Daryl Gates upon my retirement in 1986.

LAPD Chief Daryl Gates served as Chief from 1978-1992

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