Los Angeles, California
May 22, 2016
Hodel Family by Galka Scheyer taken Nov 7, 1943
(Rear Dr. George Hill Hodel age 36 and Duncan Hill Hodel age 15
Front/Left to Right, Steven, age 2, Kelvin age 1, and Michael age 4)
Just three months after committing Los Angeles’ sadistic “White Gardenia Murder” (Victim Ora Murray, July 26, 1943, was strangled and beaten to death with her semi-nude body found carefully posed on a public golf course) Dr. George Hodel is seen (left) posing with his four sons for a photograph taken by renowned LA art collector/photographer and family friend, Galka Scheyer.
Here is a short biographical description from Mark Nelson and Sarah Bayliss Hudson’s Exquisite Corpse website shown in their “A Web of Connections Map: Los Angeles 1935-1950.”
Most famously remembered as the brash agent of the “Blue Four” (Alexei Jawlensky, Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee, and Wassily Kandinsky), Galka Scheyer was a major force in introducing European modernism to LosAngeles in the 1930s and 1940s. She occasionally acted as an intermediary for Walter Arensberg when he wished to purchase works from Marcel Duchamp. A dispute over prices ruptured their relationship in 1936, but it was mended by the time of her death, in 1945. Arensberg helped ensure that her collection was preserved intact at the Pasadena Art Institute (now the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena). Scheyer had many business dealings with Earl Stendahl and she knew John Huston. During lean years, Scheyer stayed afloat financially by developing an art education class for children. A misspelled entry in Dorothy and George Hodel’s calendar notes: “Gelka Scheyer for children’s pictures.” Scheyer was also friends with Edward G. Robinson.
Handwritten Calendar entry made by Dorothy Huston Hodel for “November 7, 1943 noting appointment with Galka Scheyer for “Children’s pictures.”
Here we see that George Hodel has placed the 1943 Galka Scheyer photograph in his private photo album, which also included some of the Man Ray family photos as well as the photograph of Elizabeth “Black Dahlia” Short.
Galka Scheyer 1931
Galka Scheyer seated at left in her friend, architect, Rudolph Schindler’s Kings Road House. In 1933 Galka commissioned Richard Neutra to build her a home in the Hollywood Hills north of Sunset Blvd. She named the street Blue Heights Drive.
Richard Neutra built home for Galka Scheyer located at 1880 Blue Heights Dr., Los Angeles. Ms. Scheyer died in Los Angeles in 1945, just two years after taking the Hodel family photograph.
Richard Schindler was also friends with my father, Dr. George Hill Hodel and below are two sketches Schindler designed for some furniture my father had commissioned, circa 1940. (Courtesy of Schindler Archive, U.C. Santa Barbara.)
Hodel Family by Edmund Teske circa 1948
This photograph was taken in the inner courtyard of the Sowden/Hodel Franklin House circa 1947.
Edmund Teske whose artworks currently hang in international art museums throughout the world including Los Angeles’ Getty Museum ,was a close friend of Dr. George Hill Hodel and a regular visitor to the Hodel residence.
Teske took this second photograph from inside the living room of residence showing the three Hodel brothers seated in the courtyard.
From the Edmund Teske Archives:
…
Teske was drawn west by the allure of the motion picture industry and a desire to meet Greta Garbo. He worked in the stills department of Paramount Studios. He lived in the Frank Lloyd Wright residence of Aline Barnsdall on Olive Hill where he met Man Ray. He photographed actors and other notable folk. To name a few: Joel McCrea, Geraldine Page, Kenneth Anger, John Saxon, Ansel Adams, Jim Whitney, Ramblin Jack Elliott, Will Geer, Anais Nin, Jane Lawrence, and others.
Edmund Teske in scene clip from MGM’s Lust for Life (1956)
In this scene with Kirk Douglas (Vincent Van Gogh) and Anthony Quinn (Paul Gauguin) Edmund Teske, (marked with the white arrow) a fellow artist, is questioning Van Gogh’s skill as an artist. Teske was forty-five years old when the film was released. Quinn won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.
Incredibly, Edmund Teske, a close friend and kindred spirit to Dr. George Hodel, and Man Ray would become a prime witness in my investigation by way of a conversation he had with an Altadena architect, Steven Lamb. Lamb was an admirer of Lloyd Wright, (son of Frank) who he knew had designed and built the Sowden House, in 1926. The Lamb/Teske conversation took place in front of the Sowden home in 1978 while Lamb was taking photographs of the front exterior of the structure. Teske approached Lamb and asked, “Do you like the house?” Lamb began to respond, “Why, yes sir. It’s a very important early Lloyd Wright…” Teske interrupted him:
“It’s an evil place! Artists, philosophers, accountants and politicians we all played and paid there. Women were tortured for sport there. Murders happened there. It’s an EVIL place.”
Teske then turned and walked away. The entire meeting and conversation as described and written by Steve Lamb, are detailed in Chapter 10 of my follow-up book, Black Dahlia Avenger II (Thoughtprint Press 2014).
How bizarre that Edmund Teske, a family friend, to my father, who took one of my favorite photographs of my brothers and me in 1948, would as if by pure happenstance, some thirty years later, play a critical role in confirming that George Hodel was a sadistic killer and that tortures and murders of multiple women occurred inside the Sowden/Franklin home.
The below Hodel family photographs were taken by Surrealist/Dadaist, Man Ray in 1944, 1945 and 1946. Man Ray, became a close friend to both George and Dorothy (“Dorero”) Hodel during the artist’s “Hollywood Years” (1940-1951). His artwork and photographs were used and included as “inspirations” in my father’s serial crimes as part of his crime-signature/M.O. of, ‘Murder as a Fine Art.” The “Man Ray Nexus” becomes critical to understanding George Hodel’s insane drive to create his own “Surreal Masterpiece” by slaying, cutting and publicly posing his victims as body sculptures, and taunting, “catch me if you can” clues to his crimes.
In 1948, Man Ray and gallerist/artist William Copley published an art book, Alphabet for Adults (Copley Gallery, Los Angeles 1948) in which they included drawings of the interior of the Sowden/Hodel residence, a man and a woman (likely George and Dorero) and linked them to the letter Q for Quarrel. See Most Evil II, Chapter 9 for full details of “word games” and connections to George Hodel.
At first glance, the fact that three of Los Angeles’ most famous modern artists from the 1940s, Galka Scheyer, Edmund Teske and Man Ray would each play a role as Hodel “family photographer” appears quite astounding.
However, after discovering George Hodel’s love for the Surrealist Movement, along with his close personal ties to each of these artists in the 1940s, provides us with a much clearer understanding.
The three Hodel photographs all predate the 1947 Black Dahlia Murder. We know that both Man Ray and Edmund Teske knew their friend, George Hodel, had killed the Dahlia, shortly after the murder, as established in my investigation. It is likely that Galka Scheyer, as part of dad’s “inner circle” also discovered the truth shortly after the crime. George Hodel’s incest/child molestation crimes committed upon his 14-year-old, daughter, Tamar, occurred in the summer of 1949. (Man Ray also took nude “family photographs” of Tamar at age 12, but they were destroyed and never became a part of the later criminal prosecution.)
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