Episode 603: The Black Dahlia Murder Part IV - Exquisite Corpse

Summary

Last Podcast on the Left - Episode 603: The Black Dahlia Murder Part IV - Exquisite Corpse

Release Date: January 10, 2025
Host/Authors: The Last Podcast Network
Description: Exploring the dark and mysterious case of the Black Dahlia Murder, delving into various theories, suspects, and the intricate web of connections surrounding this infamous unsolved crime.

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Introduction

The episode kicks off with the hosts, Henry Zabrowski, Marcus Parks, and Ben Kissel, amidst a backdrop of chaotic events in Los Angeles, setting a tone of urgency and intrigue. They swiftly transition from playful banter to the core topic: the Black Dahlia Murder.

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George Hodel: The Infamous Suspect

[02:14] Ben Kissel:
The discussion centers on George Hodel, a prominent Los Angeles doctor with deep ties to Hollywood and the art world. Hodel's enigmatic persona and connections make him a compelling, albeit controversial, suspect in the Black Dahlia case.

• Henry Zabrowski [04:26]:
  Hodel is described as having "probably one of the most perfect fancy pervert mustaches in all of history," highlighting his outward charm juxtaposed with his dark reputation.

Key Points:

• Background: Born in 1907, George Hodel was a musical prodigy with a genius IQ who pursued a career in medicine.
• Professional Ties: Served as a doctor to Hollywood stars and ran a venereal disease clinic, placing him in the midst of LA's seedy underbelly.
• Connections: Maintained friendships with notable figures like filmmaker John Huston and surrealist artist Man Ray.

Notable Quote:
Henry Zabrowski [04:40]:
"With probably one of the most perfect fancy pervert mustaches in all of history."

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Steve Hodel's Accusations

George Hodel's son, Steve Hodel, a former LAPD detective supervisor, vehemently accuses his father of being the Black Dahlia murderer. Steve has authored nine books, presenting extensive but disputed evidence connecting George to the crime.

• Henry Zabrowski [06:31]:
  "I really do think that Stephen Hodel feels a lot of guilt in that way."

Key Points:

• Professional Credibility: Steve’s background in law enforcement adds weight to his theories.
• Evidence: Relies heavily on handwriting analysis and perceived behavioral patterns.
• Controversy: Faces backlash for attributing an extensive list of crimes to his father, often overstretching the evidence.

Notable Quote:
Ben Kissel [06:20]:
"Steve Hodel... writes nine books on the subject, making George one of the most prolific serial killers of his day."

---

The Surrealism Connection and "Exquisite Corpse"

The podcast delves into the potential influence of surrealist art on the Black Dahlia murder, introducing the concept of "Exquisite Corpse" – a collaborative drawing game favored by surrealists.

[04:40] Ben Kissel:
“An additional source for George Hodel, by the way, is Exquisite Corpse Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder by Mark Nelson and Sarah Hudson Bayless.”

Key Points:

• Artistic Influence: Surrealist motifs such as bisection and fragmented depictions of women mirror the mutilations of Elizabeth Short’s body.
• Man Ray’s Involvement: As a central figure in the surrealist movement, Man Ray’s works bear unsettling similarities to the crime scene.
• Exquisite Corpse Game: The collaborative nature of the game parallels theories suggesting multiple individuals may have been involved in the murder.

Notable Quote:
Ben Kissel [28:28]:
"Surrealism was an interplay of irrationality, eroticism, and violence."

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Walter Bailey: Larry Harnish's Alternative Theory

Introducing Larry Harnish, a former Los Angeles Times reporter, the hosts present an alternative suspect: Walter Bailey, a respected surgeon living near where Elizabeth Short's body was found.

[75:54] Henry Zabrowski:
"Having her older sister be connected to somebody that lives in the very block where she was put is so suspicious."

Key Points:

• Proximity: Bailey’s residence was just a block from the Biltmore Hotel, the last place Elizabeth was seen alive.
• Personal Turmoil: Suffering from early-onset Alzheimer's and undergoing a separation due to an affair, Bailey was under significant stress.
• Legal Troubles: Bailey's wife sued him over his will, claiming coercion by his Austrian lover, adding layers of potential motives.

Notable Quote:
Ben Kissel [78:17]:
"Walter Bailey... had a private practice just five blocks from the Biltmore Hotel, where Elizabeth Short was last seen alive."

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Challenges to Hodel’s Guilt

The hosts critically examine the evidence against George Hodel, highlighting inconsistencies and the lack of concrete proof tying him directly to the Black Dahlia murder.

Key Points:

• Alibi: George was recovering from a heart attack at the time of the murder, casting doubt on his involvement.
• Handwriting Analysis: Steve Hodel’s claims about handwriting similarities are contested, lacking definitive forensic backing.
• Behavioral Patterns: Hodel’s public persona of flamboyance contradicts the secrecy typically associated with such a brutal crime.

Notable Quote:
Henry Zabrowski [57:10]:
"But most importantly, he was recovering from a heart attack in January of 1947, which meant that he was far too weak to murder Elizabeth Short with such brutality."

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John Douglas’s Profile

Criminologist John Douglas offers a profile of the likely Black Dahlia killer, emphasizing characteristics that may or may not align with suspects like George Hodel and Walter Bailey.

[67:41] Ben Kissel:
"John Douglas... surmises that the man who murdered Elizabeth Short was white and in his late 20s... possibly a butcher or slaughterhouse worker."

Key Points:

• Dominant Traits: White male, late 20s, possible profession involving blood (e.g., butcher), compulsive, patient, deliberate.
• Behavioral Indicators: Likely had a history of threatening or assaulting individuals with a knife, frequented sex workers, under personal and financial stress.
• Post-Murder Behavior: Anxious, possibly attempting to erase evidence, consuming media about the case excessively.

Notable Quote:
Ben Kissel [68:02]:
"John Douglas... the killer probably frequented sex workers and was under a lot of financial and personal stress in the time leading up to the murder."

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Larry Harnish’s Investigation and Theories

Larry Harnish presents his investigation into Walter Bailey, arguing that Bailey's proximity and personal issues make him a more plausible suspect than George Hodel.

[73:30] Ben Kissel:
"Larry Harnish... disputes almost every fact about the Black Dahlia case and presents a highly compelling alternative theory."

Key Points:

• Evidence: Harnish uncovered Logan Bailey’s declining mental health, his affair, and legal battles, linking them to possible motives for murder.
• Will Change: Bailey’s alteration of his will, disinheriting his wife and children in favor of his Austrian lover, suggests hidden pressures and secrets.
• Medical Expertise: As a surgeon, Bailey had the skills necessary to mutilate and pose the body as seen in the crime scene.

Notable Quote:
Henry Zabrowski [73:25]:
"Larry, can I just ask, honestly, you didn't do this, right? As a toddler, did you do this as a toddler?"

---

Debunking and Critiques

The podcast critiques Steve Hodel’s expansive accusations against George Hodel, arguing that Steve’s theories lack sufficient evidence and verge on defamation.

Key Points:

• Overreach: Steve Hodel attributes numerous unrelated crimes to his father without concrete connections.
• Lack of Evidence: Primary evidence linking George Hodel to the Black Dahlia murder remains unproven.
• Alternative Suspects: Larry Harnish’s focus on Walter Bailey provides a more grounded and evidence-based theory.

Notable Quote:
Ben Kissel [86:34]:
"As far as why Harnish couldn't get his book published, he thinks that it's because Steve Hodel blew up the Dahlia investigation with his book, Black Dahlia Avenger."

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Conclusion

The episode wraps up with the hosts acknowledging the enduring mystery of the Black Dahlia murder. While George Hodel remains a popular suspect due to Steve Hodel’s theories, alternative theories like Larry Harnish’s focus on Walter Bailey present more compelling and evidence-based possibilities. The interplay between surrealist art influences and the brutal nature of the crime continues to intrigue and perplex true crime enthusiasts.

Notable Quote:
Ben Kissel [92:19]:
"But her sisters, her friends, you know, like everybody. She told a different story to everybody she knew and just made it a complete mystery."

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Key Takeaways

• George Hodel’s Suspect Status: Despite Steve Hodel’s aggressive claims, substantial evidence linking George Hodel directly to the Black Dahlia murder is lacking.
• Surrealism’s Role: While intriguing, the connection between surrealist art and the crime remains speculative, with no direct proof of influence.
• Walter Bailey’s Plausibility: Larry Harnish’s theory presents a more evidence-backed suspect, focusing on Bailey’s proximity, mental state, and personal turmoil during the time of the murder.
• Ongoing Mystery: The Black Dahlia case continues to be one of America’s most haunting unsolved mysteries, with new theories and suspects emerging over the decades.

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Exclusive Podcast Insights

Throughout the episode, the hosts intersperse humorous and irreverent commentary, maintaining an engaging and entertaining atmosphere while dissecting the complexities of the Black Dahlia case.

Final Notable Quote:
Marcus Parks [93:34]:
"It's a hell of a prank. It is. It's the truth. It is."

The persistent allure of the Black Dahlia Murder in popular culture underscores its enduring mystery, inviting continual exploration and debate among true crime aficionados.

Transcript

[Henry Zabrowski]

There's no place to escape to.

[Marcus Parks]

This is the last on the left.

[Henry Zabrowski]

That's when the cannibalism started. What was that? Wow. A lot of people wondered would they ever record again? Would God stop last podcast on the Left from happening due to one of his many myriad of mysteries and control of the elements.

[Marcus Parks]

I think it's Los Angeles trying to keep a rap. We gotta tell people.

[Henry Zabrowski]

You know what we gotta do, honestly? We gotta move Larry Harnish out of town.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

The fire is coming for Larry Harness. Save Larry hard. Someone's got to get the box of papers. He's got a box of papers surrounded by books. Someone go get the black DIA papers. Sorry, Larry, we got to leave you behind.

[Ben Kissel]

Welcome to last podcast on the left. Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Marcus Barks. I'm here with the concern Henry Zabrowski not flammable.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Henry Zabrowski can't be. Set a place.

[Ben Kissel]

We're doing okay too.

[Marcus Parks]

All of my horses are safe.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yes. My alpaca farm is doing so well. Good, good, good. I let my butlers go. That was like hardest part was letting them go. I went to the servants quarters and I asked them like, I do feel like you should burn alive with the house and my. The head concierge of my foyer. He said, yes, sir. Yes, I agree, sir. But still. Yeah. Against my own better wishes, I let them go.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

And I've. You know, I'm almost thinking about like, I have a personal water reservoir and I'm thinking about maybe letting the city use it. But I think for now I'm good to just keep it for my own baths.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah. Cause don't you seriously.

[Ben Kissel]

Right. You gotta get that good water.

[Henry Zabrowski]

You know, what do I do with my natural. Well, my natural water source? I'm using most of that water to perfect my white. White rice recipe.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Which is extremely good.

[Marcus Parks]

The whitest of a whole lot of rice.

[Henry Zabrowski]

White rice.

[Ben Kissel]

Well, here we are in Los Angeles, the fires are going, and we're talking about Black Dahlia Part 4 still. So now that we've covered our man Leslie Dillon, whose story shows more than anything just what police corruption can do to a murder investigation.

[Marcus Parks]

Leslie, leave her alone.

[Ben Kissel]

Let's explore the worlds of two suspects who have nothing to do with the mob or the lapd. These suspects are your old fashioned Los Angeles characters. Doctors who are both their own little individual labyrinths of secrets and lies.

[Henry Zabrowski]

There's something that gets added to, I think, when you're an LA doctor. Oh yeah, Like. Like how? Like mysteriously attractive. Your dentist is Eddie.

[Ben Kissel]

Oh.

[Henry Zabrowski]

You know what I mean? Like, there's certain things. You meet somebody and like LA is one of those places when you meet a doctor, you're almost like.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, cuz they're all actor wannabes. They all had a script.

[Henry Zabrowski]

They all were like handsome. They were beautiful people.

[Ben Kissel]

My doctor has a better head shot than I do.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah.

[Ben Kissel]

Hey, like, it's really good.

[Henry Zabrowski]

You've only been in town for a year plus.

[Ben Kissel]

That's true. Now, our first spec is included here. Not necessarily because we think he killed Elizabeth Short. He probably didn't. But he is included because he is absolutely fascinating. With surprising connections to both Hollywood and the world of fine art.

[Henry Zabrowski]

It's all. It's the character most people lead with in a Black Dahlia series. But we're not like that. Okay, you fucking pieces of shit. We went through a more important theory, all right? Now we're gonna get to it. Because that's when we chose to do it. Right, Marcus?

[Ben Kissel]

Goddamn right. It's our fucking choice. When? What?

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, we'll put the most entertaining stuff in the end because that's where it belongs as far as I'm concerned. Why do you think they do Rosalita for 15 minutes at the very end of the show?

[Ben Kissel]

Our second suspect, however, has some extremely compelling personal connections to Elizabeth Short and the neighborhood where she was found. And this suspect also slides nicely into the profile that Mindhunter author John Douglas drew up for the perpetrator of the Black Dahlia murder. So let's get into these suspects, starting with probably the most well known accused killer of Elizabeth Short, Dr. George Hodel.

[Henry Zabrowski]

With probably one of the most perfect fancy pervert mustaches in all of history. He has got such a good mustache for eating the ass of a child. It's almost like. Did he do it on purpose? Which was first?

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Ben Kissel]

An additional source for George Hodel, by the way, is Exquisite Corpse Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder by Mark Nelson and Sarah Hudson Bayless. Which is an absolutely fascinating book, full of incredible art if you can find it.

[Henry Zabrowski]

You should have seen me reading that in the. By the light of my car. So I was in my car charging my phone hours last several days and I sat there and I'm reading the Exquisite Corpse book, going through it. I read it from COVID to cover.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah, I did too. It's a great book.

[Henry Zabrowski]

It's a great book. It's also like. It's definitely a.

[Ben Kissel]

More.

[Henry Zabrowski]

It's a. It's a better version of the George Hodel story. Even though doesn't have all the details that Black Dolly Avenger has and all this up, even though whether or not you think they're fake or whatever. But I'm sitting here reading this book, and I get to the section with all the autopsy pictures mixture, you know, comparing them to the surrealist paintings, and my neighbor, I just hear a ding, ding, ding. And a headlamp comes into it. And I just look into my neighbor looking down, and I just see the pool of light just onto the dead open of Elizabeth Short, right? Like, Anthony just sitting in the dark. You know, the wind's like. And he comes in. He's just like, I got that battery pack you asked for. What are you reading? This is my show. And then I, I. I'm not even joking. I sat with him for 20 minutes, and I gave him the whole rundown, and I just. He got the podcast. He got the podcast from me in the car. So, yeah, he got to see it, too. And I was just. Yeah, it was fun.

[Ben Kissel]

That's great. Now, the reason why we know so much about George Hodel and his connections to the Black Dahlia murder is because his son, Steve Hodel, is so convinced that his father did the crime that he's written nine books on the subject.

[Marcus Parks]

I hate my dad.

[Henry Zabrowski]

He does. He's like, my daddy never ate my ass. No, that's not true. I'm sorry, Steve Hodel. Please don't sue us. I just.

[Marcus Parks]

Don't send the police after us.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Please, Mr. O'Dell, but these guys are it. It's interesting. He not only thinks that his father did the Black Dahlia murder, but he thinks his father is the biggest criminal that has ever lived. He thinks his father has done every murder.

[Ben Kissel]

He thinks his father is a super villain, like, his father is, like, the head of the Guild of Calamitous Intent.

[Henry Zabrowski]

It's. It's close, but he's bad.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah, he's definitely bad. But, you know, let's get more into this story. Now, while nine books make Steve sound like a crackpot with a penchant for self publishing, he was actually an LAPD detective supervisor for 24 years. He's conducted thousands of criminal investigations and has been involved in 300 murder cases. But because of his resume, he does, according to his very own book, hold himself in very high regard.

[Henry Zabrowski]

He really does.

[Ben Kissel]

It's pretty good.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Well, he doesn't sound not. I don't want to be mean. He doesn't sound like he's sure of himself, much like Papa was.

[Marcus Parks]

See, I'm a Larry Harness guy, so Steve can Go fucking suck it.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Team Larry. Dude, it's me. I'm fucking sitting you. Larry, Listen, dude, let's fucking go to his house, man. Let's TP his house. Come on, man.

[Ben Kissel]

We're talking about Larry Harness. Like the audience knows who the fuck he is. Audience doesn't know who the fuck Larry Harnish is just yet.

[Henry Zabrowski]

He's our fucking boy, dude. He's my fucking secondhand soldier. My main general.

[Ben Kissel]

We talked about him at the end of last episode. He is the grumpy. He is now the self proclaimed grumpiest man in the world.

[Henry Zabrowski]

I love him.

[Ben Kissel]

But according to Steve Hodel, according to himself, Steve was a real life hero born out of the imagination of Hollywood. Steve wrote this about himself.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Citizens saw me exactly as they knew me from television. Tall, trim and handsome. With spit shine shoes and a gleaming badge. There was no difference between me and my actor cop counterparts on Dragnet or Adam12. Have you ever had a semen fucking shine? Tell me, buddy, have you ever shined your shoes with a nice dollop of African semen? Come on, enjoy yourself. Enjoy yourself at the airport. Just like I did, looking handsome on my way down to my ninth rape case of the week.

[Marcus Parks]

I bought a spit shine, but never a cum shine shoe.

[Henry Zabrowski]

It's so hard to do because you gotta wait.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, yeah. So it's like you gotta show them your breasts.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah. Look away, look away while you sit there. And he's just like, yes, sir. Yes, yes. Very feminine.

[Ben Kissel]

I tried bringing him a magazine, he said he didn't want it.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yes, good. Proud American man.

[Marcus Parks]

I told I drew nipples on my balls for him.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Very good little tips, top and bottom.

[Ben Kissel]

After Steve's father, George Hodel, died in 1999, Steve went through his father's things and found pictures of a woman he didn't recognize. Pictures that appeared as if they were from the 1940s. As Steve stared at these pictures, more and more he came to believe that these were never before seen photos of Elizabeth Short. Now, we're not alone in saying that the girl in these pictures is absolutely not Elizabeth Short.

[Henry Zabrowski]

We know for a fact definitely one of is not Elizabeth.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah. I mean, in these two pictures don't even really look like the same woman.

[Henry Zabrowski]

No, they do not. No, no. They kind of look kind of maybe the same, but they just kind of look like ladies.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

And it's black.

[Ben Kissel]

Pair of ladies.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah. And it's black and white, so we can't really tell.

[Ben Kissel]

But the photographs were close enough of a match to send Steve on a mission. To delve into his father's past to see if there was some nefarious connection. Because Steve did know that his father, George Hodel, had a checkered past. To say the very least.

[Henry Zabrowski]

I think that obviously just George Hodel's actions as a whole Will put him on the suspect list.

[Ben Kissel]

Sure.

[Henry Zabrowski]

I think it makes a lot of sense. And I think that Stephen Hodel feels a lot of guilt in that way. But he also might have some of his father's traits in the way. In terms of being extremely bullheaded about very arcane things.

[Ben Kissel]

Could be.

[Marcus Parks]

So George is definitely a prick bastard. Whether Steve's right or not.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Eddie, don't. Let's don't tell him. Yes, let Eddie choose after the story. Let me see if he decides George Hodel is bad or not.

[Ben Kissel]

So, George Hodel, Steve's father and the main suspect of this section, Was a Los Angeles native born in 1907. He was a musical prodigy with a genius IQ of 186. Who eventually decided on a career in medicine.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yes, I did receive one more point than Einstein. And I believe it was because when I took the test, I was fully aroused. I'm the horniest 10 year old that's ever been. He had the mustache since he was 5. He fell off his mom's pussy when he was coming out.

[Marcus Parks]

Let me glue this on my son.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Very good.

[Ben Kissel]

After med school, Hodel made a name for himself in Hollywood As a sort of doctor to the stars. Partnering with a mysterious Japanese physician about whom little is known.

[Marcus Parks]

Someone's got to get the opium.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah. George also ran a venereal disease clinic. And as a result, he was put in charge of controlling venereal disease in the city of Los Angeles. When he was named head of the LA County Health Department in 1939. In other words, Hodel had direct connections to the grubbiest parts of this city. And he was a powerful man with a lot of connections to boot.

[Henry Zabrowski]

I consider myself more of a vagina sheriff. I try to make sure every vagina is clean. It is within the justice system. And when it is not, it is thoroughly banished.

[Ben Kissel]

So, George, how do you do those things? Like, what's your main. Like, what's your main goal here?

[Henry Zabrowski]

I just can tell when a woman is clean by the way she sits in a chair.

[Marcus Parks]

What is your favorite venereal disease?

[Henry Zabrowski]

Honestly, it's so hard to choose. It's like choosing which child of mine to have sex with. And it's glaucoma. Because glaucoma doesn't allow you to see who you're having sex with.

[Marcus Parks]

It's the best to go on a pretzel.

[Henry Zabrowski]

You think Master?

[Ben Kissel]

No, I don't know for sure but it seems like George Hodel's inside track to Hollywood and beyond ran through a childhood friend. This is incredible. George grew up with Hollywood legend John Houston. He fucking directed the Maltese Falcon, played the main villain in Chinatown.

[Marcus Parks]

That's probably where Houston's dad.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Houston's death.

[Henry Zabrowski]

And they all live a whole. That's the connection.

[Ben Kissel]

What?

[Henry Zabrowski]

I'll get back to it.

[Marcus Parks]

The street I used to live on was named after.

[Ben Kissel]

No.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, that was like where he. I honestly think that during where we lived specifically in North Hollywood. Yeah. I do weirdly think there's a lot of places where they would like put their like malls. They would put their like ladies when they were working at the studio gun mall. Yes. Their girlfriends would stay where we live in North Hollywood and their wives would be in the homes side of the hill that just got burnt down. And then they are just. And then John Houston would work at the studios that are down the street to come over North Hollywood, all the ladies on the side and then go.

[Marcus Parks]

Home, come wash their penis and then.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Come home in the LA River.

[Ben Kissel]

Now George and director John Huston remained friends into adulthood. And they were so close that after John Houston divorced his wife in 1933, George married her soon after.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Is that close?

[Ben Kissel]

I think it is because he. Well he knew John Huston. That's how he knew this woman.

[Henry Zabrowski]

And then he double dates with. With each other's wives and then they swap wives. Essential.

[Ben Kissel]

I don't know if they swapped wives. I just know that John Houston divorced this woman, Dorothy. And you know, George Hodel picked her up.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, yeah. Sucked her up. I can still taste John's kisses. I love five layers of my friend's kisses right on your lips.

[Marcus Parks]

John Houston is a scary looking man.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah.

[Ben Kissel]

That's why he's one of the greatest. Like his villain and his portrayal of the villain in Chinatown is one of the greatest villain portrayals in cinematic history.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Ben Kissel]

Well, John Houston's ex wife would become Steve Hodel's mother. Although she and George Hodel were divorced by 1944 after Steve's mother filed a complaint of extreme cruelty. Now by 1945, George Hodel was one of LA's reigning shady weirdos. Performing illegal abortions in between hedonistic orgies held at his Frank Lloyd Wright Jr. Designed home which had been bizarrely constructed in the style of a Mayan temple.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Shangri LA of Los Angeles.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Have you ever seen it? Have you ever driven past it?

[Marcus Parks]

No.

[Henry Zabrowski]

It is, it's beautiful. It's in Los Feliz. You go by it is this. It looks sort of like a mini Mayan version of the Chrysler Building where it's like, it's got like these kind of mirrored tower to the top. It's extremely beautiful. And you could see, you're like, oh, where do chorus girls go to get murdered on group by Hollywood millionaires? You're like, that house. If you look at the inside of it, all the sales pitches of it, because there was a whole. When he was trying to sell the house, George Hodel took all these self pictured like, oh, he took pictures inside the house of him like modeling it. And it looks like a James Bond villain's house. And it's just him just being like, wouldn't you love to live in the opulence of Shangri La? Wouldn't you love to sit in the living room of Shangri La? And it's just all like. Looks like Kanye West's house where everything's made out of cinder blocks.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. And it's all tile and concrete. So if you kill a girl, you can just clean it with a hose super easy.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Nice.

[Marcus Parks]

Lots of drains.

[Ben Kissel]

Now on May 9, 1945, suspicion fell on George when his secretary suddenly died in his presence. On that night, George allegedly called his ex wife and told her to come over to his secretary's apartment. When George's ex wife arrived, she found George's secretary unconscious from a barbiturate overdose. Incredibly, Hodel's main concern was not his secretary, but the two manuscripts that she had written. Manuscripts that he gave to his ex wife to burn. Hodel's ex wife did as she was told and the secretary quickly died from an overdose while Hodel moved on with his life, having squashed whatever secrets she may have had.

[Henry Zabrowski]

So just let that stick in your head. That is like one of the big cruxes of this entire story.

[Ben Kissel]

That is extraordinarily easily disproved, of course.

[Henry Zabrowski]

But it's like this is the things that Steve Hodel will build the George Hodel story around stuff like this. The idea that he said burn these manuscripts, do these. And it's also crazy to think that he was so mean and so crazy. But his ex wives kept coming back.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, you know, powerful man, got lots of money and stuff.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah. That happens a lot in abusive relationships.

[Henry Zabrowski]

It's true.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. It's also just like shows how easy it was to just get away with killing someone back then if you had just like a moderate amount of money.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah. Oh. And it continues to this day. Eddie, don't worry. From your grave.

[Marcus Parks]

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[Henry Zabrowski]

Squarespace is the all in one website platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online. You make a website, do you use the website succeed? Thanks, Squarespace. Now that I found the little boy that now is running the horse picks empire, I am angry with the way that he is handling it. A lot of these horses, honestly, it's subpar and a lot of it's pretty lazy. The current J.D. vance horse that they just put a beard on is honestly, as far as I'm concerned, extremely, extremely offensive to me as a person with a former bearded face. So now that's why I have started my own new website. Thanks to Squarespace. Destroy HorsePix.com. because the goal is to go after this rogue child that took my dream and perverted it. And ha. And the only entity that can help me in my search for revenge against this one childlike entrepreneur, Squarespace. Check out squarespace.com for a free trial. And when you're Ready to launch squarespace.com left to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. I'm coming for you, Charlie Bucket. Get a head start on your financial goals for the new year with the help of Mint Mobile. Mint Mobile lets you maximize your savings with plans starting at $15 a month. When you purchase a three month plan, all Mint Mobile plans include high speed data, unlimited talk and text on the largest 5G network. And you can keep your phone and number. I love the amount of money that I've saved for Mint Mobile so much it has allowed me to purchase my own Boston Dynamics protection dog that I've outfitted with a cute rifle's head with little ears on it. And he barks going stop, police. Stop police. Stop police. He's so cute. And we went and we got his DNA done and it turns out he's 100% killer robot. Which is honestly, I would not have had that money to do the testing if I didn't save so much money with Mint Mobile. To get this new customer offer on your new 3 month unlimited wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month, go to mintmobile.com lpotl that's mintmobile.com lpotl Cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month at mintmobile.com lpotl $45 upfront payment required. Equivalent to $15 per month new customers on first 3 month plan only. Speed slower above 40 gigabytes on a limited plan. Additional taxes, fees and restrictions apply. See Mint Mobile for details.

[Ben Kissel]

Now when it comes to Hodel's connections, he would host gatherings at his home that centered around drug fueled hypnotism sessions that were led by George. And that's when he wasn't hosting the orgies.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Now we're going deeper, deeper. 1. On the count of three, you will turn into the horniest chicken I've ever seen. 3. Cock. Cock. Very good. Yes, very good. Yes, very good. Oh, you're not a chicken anymore.

[Marcus Parks]

Wolf.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Wolf. Wolf. Yeah, and that's how you hypnotize a dog. Easy to do. Let's all it. Come on, John Houston, let's get Bette Davis. Let's get her a fake cock and have her fuck this dog in front of us, huh? Yeah, all right.

[Marcus Parks]

Sure she has Bette Davis eyes. But how about a Betty Davis vagina?

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, let's check her.

[Ben Kissel]

That's the thing is that Bette Davis and George Hodel probably did meet each other at the very least, because Bette Davis was actually very big in the modern art scene in Los Angeles. That's a. That. One of the things I found out is actually the. The people that are most responsible for modern art coming to Los Angeles are Vincent Price, number one.

[Marcus Parks]

That makes sense.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah.

[Ben Kissel]

Vincent Price, John Houston and Edgar G. Robinson.

[Henry Zabrowski]

That's awesome. Yeah. Is it crazy? And. But also the story will go.

[Ben Kissel]

Betty Davis is also in the art scene a lot as well.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, yeah. All of. Basically most of LACMA was like brought here by Vincent Price.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah, it's very.

[Henry Zabrowski]

It's fascinating.

[Marcus Parks]

That's very cool.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah. It's crazy shit. But George Hodel was ensconced within the Los Angeles art scene at this time. And these gatherings at George's place were attended by a wide range of artists, writers and people in the film industry for writers. For example, novelist Henry Miller was a frequent guest at George Hodel's home. And Henry Miller, if you'll remember, could himself write quite the tawdry tale.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yes, I went. I dropped off some chopper of. I had two extra copies of Tropic of Cancer. For some reason, I dropped them off in some little libraries in my neighborhood.

[Marcus Parks]

Oh, my God. Nothing makes me happier than putting a sample satanic book in a church library.

[Henry Zabrowski]

It really makes me happy. I just think it's important for some lady to read about poetry, about anal warts. It's important. You've read Henry Miller?

[Marcus Parks]

No.

[Henry Zabrowski]

I'll give you some.

[Marcus Parks]

All right, great. I'll not read it then too.

[Ben Kissel]

But George's company most infamously included the surrealist painter and photographer Man Ray. Now, while people like Henry Miller came in and out of George's world and knew him pretty much as a local eccentric, Man Ray was a family friend of the hotels and took what I'd call a suspicious amount of photos of both George and his ex wife.

[Henry Zabrowski]

And you could. The reason why it's suspicious is because they are like. Because Man Ray will go on to kind of deny whatever connections. Everyone denies connections to George Hodel. But he obviously was friends with them. He took pictures of like, candid pictures of his kids. Candid pictures of them hanging out. Yes. Man Ray could be people did pay him to go and take pictures at their home. Right. Like to come and do a big photographer, like, you know, you go do whatever. I don't Even know what the term. It is like a big like actual put together, choreographed film photo shoot.

[Ben Kissel]

A family photo.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, but with families.

[Marcus Parks]

A family photo shoot.

[Ben Kissel]

Family photo.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, but Man Ray would do them. What do you think is fascinating?

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah, I mean, you get incredible photos. I mean, Man Ray is nothing if not extraordinarily talented. I mean, his work is incredible, you know, despite what we may say about his personal life.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

How many photos of your wife and someone else's possession is too much? We say like, like five.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Well, it depends on what situation.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

If it's from across the street.

[Marcus Parks]

If I paid them to take pictures.

[Henry Zabrowski]

As many.

[Marcus Parks]

As many as you. Many as I paid for.

[Ben Kissel]

Well.

[Henry Zabrowski]

And they're going to go through all the negatives anyway and choose.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

So you don't even get to choose those pictures. Yeah.

[Ben Kissel]

But to understand why the connection between George Hodel and Man Ray is so interesting, you got to understand a little bit about surrealism, which is the art movement that Man Ray belonged to and the one that George Hodel was obsessed with.

[Henry Zabrowski]

So get your holes ready, dude, because it's time for. Oh, do we got a good lick for this? It's Art History. Last podcast on our. This is the most extreme we have. Undercover dude, we're coming for you. Surrealism. It's the art of space. The art of space. Continue, Mark.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah, no, I'm glad you guys fucking prepped. You guys lubed up the chamber. Thank you.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Ready? Ready for. To Art History.

[Ben Kissel]

Well, basically surrealism was the next step after the Dada movement, defined in the book Exquisite Corpse as a heady call to arms extolling freedom of imagination and liberation from social constraints all anal style wise. It's just like. It sounds like it's surreal. It's unsettling stuff. You know Salvador Dali, he's the most well known surrealist artist out there. Everyone, yeah, the good shit everyone's got. Everyone's seen a surrealist painting in their life. Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Fucking stupid. Clocks can't not be melted and shit. Time, dudes.

[Henry Zabrowski]

It's hard. You never. I know you're afraid of clocks in the first place, cuz you don't even like the concept of time. I know, Eddie.

[Marcus Parks]

You said clock.

[Henry Zabrowski]

I know.

[Marcus Parks]

I'll rip your hand off, you put a watch on it.

[Henry Zabrowski]

I know.

[Marcus Parks]

I'mma chew on your fingers.

[Henry Zabrowski]

This is just art history, Eddie.

[Ben Kissel]

Not times.

[Henry Zabrowski]

It's not real.

[Ben Kissel]

You calm down.

[Henry Zabrowski]

You good? Yeah. Very warm.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. Any number under 13 just gets me going.

[Henry Zabrowski]

He has a hard time with him. Yeah, he has a hard time with it, he can't deal. He loves a baker's team. But Surrealism, also, remember, the goal was to break through. They were having problems with what they viewed as the staid kind of realism movement that was happening. And surrealism came out of World War I because of the horrors and the atrocities that humans did. The idea was to sort of break through to the subconscious in many different ways. So they would try all these different exercises to try to get through to the subconscious and create that and from a direct concept from the artist to the canvas.

[Ben Kissel]

Now, at times, surrealism was an interplay of irrationality, eroticism, and violence. And when it came to women in Surrealism, they were rarely displayed as fully human entities in Surrealist art. Rather, the women in surrealist paintings and photography, particularly the works of Man Ray, featured recurring motifs of bisected and fragmented women, just as Elizabeth Short was bisected and fragmented. Now, many of the Surrealists were fascinated with violence, both real and imagined legend in the real world. They were captivated by true crime stories, violent accounts of Catholic saints and Jack the Ripper. But they were also obsessed with the fictional writings of the Marquis de Sade, particularly his unfinished novel, 120 Days of Sodom.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, dude, it's about 30 days too long. I watch Salo. We all see. You saw Salo, right?

[Ben Kissel]

I didn't see Salo.

[Henry Zabrowski]

You've never seen it?

[Ben Kissel]

No.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Let's go take a look at it.

[Ben Kissel]

I've read, like, graphic representations of 120 days of Sodom, though. It's a foul. Yeah, awful.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, it's fun or whatever. Some people like it.

[Ben Kissel]

No, I haven't seen. I mean, it's not like every graphic representation, because if you graphically represented the things that happened in 120 days of Sodom, you would be producing child pornography.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Well, that's the part you really got to skip. That's what I'd say. I'd say that is less is more.

[Ben Kissel]

Now to briefly recap the story, because it is important. 120 Days of Sodom is a novel from 1785 about four rich, libertine Frenchmen who spend four months in a secluded castle in the middle of the forest trying to top each other in the realm of sexual perversion.

[Henry Zabrowski]

It's a true exploration of the rarer fragrances.

[Ben Kissel]

And what are the rarer fragrances?

[Henry Zabrowski]

Every single time you hear the term, like George Hodel, this is a thing that comes up a lot in like, like, artsy, fartsy, old school erotica. Like. Oh, yes. An exploration of the rarer Fragrances, which always means. But hole.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Oh, yeah, yeah. The rarer fragrance. Yeah, juices is juices and butthole.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Ben Kissel]

Messes. We're using 20 victims and eight male accomplices with large penises. Accomplices dead. Simply called the.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yes. Hey, yeah, we're the. You order. Yeah, we're the. Just so you know, I got. I got a hard out at 8.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

I got to be at the White House tonight, but when I'm done with.

[Marcus Parks]

This will be the brown house.

[Henry Zabrowski]

You know, say it anyway. But that's just kind of a joke between. We mostly say that. You know how it is. I come out, I, you know, sometimes I shoot myself in the head and I wake up and I'm just alive again. And I just go out and I. Again and a bunch of stuff. And then I get ripped apart by a bunch of dogs. And then all of a sudden I just wake up again and I go. And I. And then I get burnt alive with a bunch of acid and I don't.

[Marcus Parks]

Know, man, I'm sorry, did you mean to order suckers? Because we're.

[Henry Zabrowski]

That's the sucker we're using.

[Ben Kissel]

20 victims in this story, the four Frenchmen engage in incest, rape, necrophilia, bestiality, coprophilia, urine drinking, vomit drinking, and child sex abuse until it all culminates in murder most foul. And I do mean foul.

[Henry Zabrowski]

I do everything but feet stuff. That's the only thing I can't stand. I can't stand feet. But otherwise I'll a jar of peanut butter into the mouth of a giraffe. All right, I will. Whatever it is. You knew I got a 9 inch and a. It doesn't matter. It works until I'm dead.

[Marcus Parks]

What's coprophilia?

[Ben Kissel]

Eating shit.

[Marcus Parks]

Ah, cool.

[Ben Kissel]

Hell yeah. You learn something new today.

[Marcus Parks]

Thank God.

[Ben Kissel]

But above all else, the novel 120 Days of Sodom is so depraved as to be totally surreal. And the surrealist movement of the 20th century loved the novel for both its style and because they fancied themselves as libertines free from all social constraints.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Surrealists, much like any group of artists, they fancy themselves a little bit more hard core than they actually are.

[Ben Kissel]

Oh yes. As the wife of surrealist painter Max Ernst put it, most surrealists flew close to the flame of de Sade on an intellectual level. But as for emulating the fantasies of De Sade's personne, they didn't even try.

[Henry Zabrowski]

There are a bunch of people that wear suits too much to be eating that much Shit. Oh yeah, you know, they all wear suits.

[Ben Kissel]

But because the surrealists didn't dabble, that did not mean that some of them weren't associated with the people who did. Did people like George Hodel?

[Henry Zabrowski]

I view George Hodel as a Jeffrey Epstein like character.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah. Very close to that type. Yeah. Just like this sort of like rich puppet master with a lot of very famous friends, a lot of very well known friends who throws a lot of. That throws a lot of parties and comes very close to getting to getting some sort of comeuppance but never quite gets there.

[Marcus Parks]

Someone who's a lot of fun until you really get to know him.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Well, the problem is a lot of fun for a.

[Ben Kissel]

About an hour and a half.

[Henry Zabrowski]

And it's a lot of fun that you're definitely having somebody else's expense and you're not asking a lot of questions about. And then what you does in its own way is that it creates its own secret keeping mechanism. As we've seen George Her Dell is a. He is a lot of money. He has weird. We don't really know what he does for a living. He does a bunch of different stuff. Right.

[Ben Kissel]

Like he does a doctor, Hollywood doctor to the stars. But it's very vague.

[Henry Zabrowski]

So.

[Marcus Parks]

But gives them drugs.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yes. And helps him with venereal diseases on the down low. Helps him with abortions on the down low. Helps them with any. Any various problem that would be considered publicly embarrassing. That is somebody who traffics in secrets like that is his job as a traffic in secrets. So then what is happening is that then other secrets congregate. And it takes a type of person and I think George Hodel. It's why we think he could have within his depths, he might be one considered to do. He would have considered to do the Black Dahlia murder because he just was so kind of in his own world of. Of ideas that no one cared. He viewed himself as past of everyone.

[Marcus Parks]

Steve's blowing up Daddy's spot, man.

[Henry Zabrowski]

You leave Daddy alone.

[Marcus Parks]

Now.

[Ben Kissel]

The surrealist painter and photographer Man Ray moved to Los Angeles at the age of 50 after escaping World War II Europe. And he eventually made friends with George Hodel in Los Angeles. Man Ray's work, which often featured nude women, was said to be the finest defense of surrealism's central theme of transgressions via eroticism, which pointed more towards death than sexuality. In one photograph, Man Ray did a self portrait of himself lying on top of the dead body of a woman killed by a gunshot. And in one of his paintings, Man Ray portrayed An abstract female, bisected at the waist, just like Elizabeth Short was. Both of these works were finished in the 30s, years before the Black Dahlia murder. And we're not saying that Man Ray was directly involved in the killing of Elizabeth Short. But he has been named as a person who may have involved himself in George Hodel's more disgusting pursuits.

[Henry Zabrowski]

He was around for the parties. Yeah, I I Man Ray was probably around for a lot of the parties. And Man Ray was one of these guys. But I think that that was his main connection to this art world.

[Ben Kissel]

Like, he had other Man Ray was.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Man Ray was the guy that was his, like, buddy. That was the guy that was, like, showing up and taking pictures of other people and doing other things. And then may or may not have taken a bunch of naked pictures of his daughter.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Like, you don't have to be so weird now. He took a picture on top of an actual dead woman.

[Ben Kissel]

Or was it staged? No. Staged, no. We don't know. For Man Ray and George Hodel connected in the first place. But George Hodel was certainly an arty weirdo. And the Los Angeles art world in the 1940s was predictably small. George Odell's throwing around a lot of money, and he's buying a lot of works of art. And that's the thing, is that no one can really figure out why Man Ray went to Los Angeles in the first place. Although he said it was to get as far away from the war as possible. What we do know is that Man Ray was close to George HODEL in the 11 years he lived in Los Angeles. And this was confirmed by George Hodel's daughter Tamal.

[Henry Zabrowski]

There was a little bit of a hint of why he went to Los Angeles in terms of. Apparently, the art scene itself was starting to die out in New York. So all of surrealism, right after World War II came to New York. And it turned into this essentially kind of a commercial enterprise. Salvador Dali. Everyone kind of got mad at Salvador Dali. Because at this point, Salvador Dali was on, like, television shows. He was showing himself to be the face of working realism.

[Marcus Parks]

Disney.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yes. He's doing all of these things, and he's making a lot of money, and he's taking private commissions. And to them, he's ruining surrealism because he's making it about commercialism. And so that might be one of the reasons why Man Ray moved from New York to L. A. Yeah.

[Ben Kissel]

But as far as Man Ray's connections to George Hodel goes, George Hodel's daughter Tamar, said that Man Ray often photographed the whole family. And she said that he took nude photographs of her on occasion when she was still a young teenager. That, however, is not the worst of what happened to Tamar in George Hodel's home. Because the thing that happened to Tamar is the catalyst to why we even know about George Hodel in the first, first place. And that's what makes me wonder so much, is like we just know George Hodel because of what I'm about to talk about. How many George Hodels have existed in Los Angeles? Many have existed in this city and over the last, you know, 120 some.

[Marcus Parks]

Odd years up to like this century, like, oh, of course it was because.

[Ben Kissel]

No, there's still a George Odell today. But how many have there been?

[Marcus Parks]

I mean, at least. Least, I'm going to say 150.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Oh, there's up. There is a pack of them. I think that anybody could go to a place where it is. It was lawless out here. And if you had a lot of money, you could really figure it out. And then if you read the works of Kenneth Anger, this happened way more than we even think it did. But then it. That might be exaggerated.

[Marcus Parks]

It's also. Not only was it lawless, like, it wasn't even in check, like New York's in check with the Mafia, you know, like the Mafia wasn't even in control out here.

[Henry Zabrowski]

No.

[Ben Kissel]

Well, In October of 1949, Tamar Hodel, who was then just 14 years old, she told police that during one of her father's orgies at their home, he had raped her. And this act was witnessed by two other people. Hodel was soon arrested and put on trial for this horrific crime. George Hodel's lawyers had a simple plan for getting their client acquitted. Their plan was to discredit Tamar Hodel completely, to make her look crazy. And they partly did so by using the Black Dahlia murder. During a conversation with the man who rented a room in their home, Tamar had said that her father's house had secret passages and that her father was going to kill her and everyone else in the house because he had an insatiable bloodlust. That bloodlust, Tamar had said, had already taken a victim. The infamous Black Dahlia. Now, Tamar was obviously making a joke. She said.

[Henry Zabrowski]

So, yeah, she said that they were talking about it sort of in a ridiculous way of the other things that he could have done.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, it was the most popular news story of the time.

[Ben Kissel]

Time, probably. Exactly. It's the worst thing you can say that someone did. Like, oh, he killed the. He's the Black Dahlia Killer. You know, it's like. It's a byword for psychopath.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Ben Kissel]

But the lawyers used these comments to make Tamar look like she'd say just about anything to smear her father. And their scheme worked perfectly. While there was plenty of evidence against Hodel, he was eventually acquitted of all charges. Although he did make a few well placed bribes along the way to make sure that happen again. The corruption muddles things. But what was interesting about the acquittal was the reaction from Man Ray. Or should I say the lack of reaction from photographer Man Ray. A year after George's incest trial, Man Ray sent a friendly postcard to George from Paris, asking Hodel if he wanted anything from France besides a coquette, which is another word for a tart or a floozy.

[Henry Zabrowski]

You know, I always like to write postcards casually, my friends, saying, you want me to traffic a woman for you? Heard you're lonely. I actually abduct a woman for you and take her from this country, if you want.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah. Even in joking. Who says that?

[Henry Zabrowski]

Hey, buddy. Hey, Marcus. Oh, you're going. Oh, I see you're leaving town. When you come back, could you bring me a trafficked woman? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't like her to like it. I don't want her to agree. I want her to be against her will.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, younger the better.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Thank you.

[Ben Kissel]

If you could.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Baby. Looking for a baby.

[Ben Kissel]

Well, this tone suggests that Man Ray was not in the least bit disturbed by Hodel's incest trial. But when it comes to the surrealist link to the Black Dahlia murder, one of the most interesting parallels involves a game called Exquisite Corpse, which is what the book we use today is named after.

[Henry Zabrowski]

It does sound like one of those, like the blood on the dance floor kind of like weird. Like new metal bands, you know what I mean? Like one of those weird scream medals.

[Ben Kissel]

Oh, there had to have been a screamo band called Exquisite Corpse at some point.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, right.

[Ben Kissel]

There's a band called the Black Dahlia Murder, our friend.

[Marcus Parks]

It's like if artists played the aristocracy aristocrats.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, well, the Exquisite Corpse is a fun name, but it is just a game.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah. And it's not necessarily to see who can do, like, the most disgusting thing or anything like that. Like, it's just to kind of see who can do the most inventive thing. Well, in the Exquisite Corpse games, three artists take turns drawing a section of a body without seeing any other section, the first takes the head and shoulders, the second draws the torso, and the third finishes up everything below the waist. Exquisite Corpse was particularly popular with the surrealists. And in 1934, an exquisite corpse drawing by four noted surrealist artists that bore a large number of similarities to the mutilations performed on Elizabeth Short's body got published. And this is about 13 years before Elizabeth Short was killed.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Whoa.

[Ben Kissel]

In this delicate crayon on paper depiction of a woman's body, the figure's breasts are replaced by simple circular shapes that enclose asymmetrical triangles. As you might remember when we talked about Elizabeth Short's autumn autopsy, her right breast was removed, which left behind a circular wound. And on her left breast, a triangular shape was cut out of her skin just to the right of her nipple. In the Exquisite Corpse drawing in question, there's also a yellow mark just above the genital area, which corresponds to the vertical incision made on Elizabeth Short's body in the exact same place. But most important was the position of this drawing's arm. See, a woman with her arms raised above her head was a weirdly common motif in Surrealism, but it was specifically common in the works of Man Ray. In multiple Man Ray photographs, he features solitary nude women over and over again with their arms bent, held over their head. And the woman in the Exquisite corpse drawing we're talking about here has her arms in the same position. The position of the arms in both the drawing and Man Ray's photos mirror the exact way Elizabeth Short's body was found. Found.

[Henry Zabrowski]

I feel like I know her, but sometimes my arms bend back. It's. Again, it's another David lynch connection. It's just a picture of the. The picture of the lady is a definite connection.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah, but this motif didn't stop with Man Ray. There was an incredible amount of surrealist art by multiple artists created both before and after the Black Dalia murder that look uncannily like the crime scene photos taken in Leimert park in a way that no other art movement connects to a specific, specific murder.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Well, you know what the. Do you know what the Minotaur means?

[Ben Kissel]

The Minotaur. I mean, the Minotaur is. I mean, that's a little too. Like. I thought about going into the Minotaur, but the Minotaur is like a massive side quest.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Just quick. The reason why the Minotaur is even used. The position that she's in, it was considered to be the Minotaur position. The Minotaur was this. Was this Half man, half beast character that was put in the center of a labyrinth. And because he was this abomination. And then Theseus went all the way through to attack the monster, and then he used a golden thread to find his way out of the labyrinth. But the whole thing is about what they say. It's about the Freudian dip into the subconscious, going through the labyrinth to find the minotaur, which is the thing inside of you that you maybe don't want to see, or the thing unknown inside of you you don't want to see, and then pulling it out, which is why the surrealists were using that.

[Marcus Parks]

So in this theory, Elizabeth Short was an art piece.

[Ben Kissel]

Well, let's get into it now. The posing of Elizabeth Short's body has always been one of the biggest question marks in the Black Dahlia case, one that no one has ever been able to fully satisfy. In fact, it's one that most people haven't even been able to approach. No, but author Steve Hodel, George Hodel's son, he thinks that he cracked it using something he calls a thought print.

[Henry Zabrowski]

You know how your fingers got a print and your butt's got a print? When you sit in the sand, I'm with you. Sometimes your thought could have a print.

[Marcus Parks]

Oh, Jesus.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah. No, listen. No, listen. It's easy to do. My thumb print.

[Marcus Parks]

Huh?

[Henry Zabrowski]

My fingerprint. Yeah, my butt print.

[Marcus Parks]

Gotcha.

[Henry Zabrowski]

My thought print.

[Marcus Parks]

I don't like it.

[Ben Kissel]

According to Steve, thought prints, like fingerprints.

[Henry Zabrowski]

It's like a fingerprint. Okay, all right. Like a butt print. It's different every time. Everybody got a different butt.

[Marcus Parks]

God damn it, Steve.

[Ben Kissel]

Get out of here. Well, thought prints relate to the potential identification of a specific individual through his or her own unique thinking and thoughts.

[Henry Zabrowski]

It's a thought print.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah. The thinking behind the posing of Short's body, Steve maintains, is that the killer was a surrealist who wanted to shock the world with the most transgressive work of art in history. This would be a surrealist who took the motifs of bisection, raised arms, and mutilation to the next level by using an actual woman as the canvas.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Genius. Absolutely exemplary.

[Ben Kissel]

And the reason why they call it the minotaur position, you know, with the arms raised up, is because of a man. Ray photograph called Minotaur, which is. Shows just a woman's torso and her arms raised up above her head. And the shadows make it look like a bull's head, you know, like the. The. The breast, the nipples of the eyes, you know, and the arms are the horns. But that's how it came to be known as the Minotaur position.

[Marcus Parks]

I gotcha. I just don't think an artist could keep their mouth shut if they did accomplish this.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Well, that was the idea. Is that then they. The show off of the corpse is their gallery.

[Marcus Parks]

No, but they would like to say.

[Henry Zabrowski]

That I'm the one.

[Marcus Parks]

I'm the greatest. I created the Minotaur of Short.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Impossible.

[Ben Kissel]

Yes, well, and that's the thing, is that there are other theories that would make that even more difficult. It's been posited in the past that the Black Dahlia murder was the work of more than one person because of the differing ways in which the body was mutilated and manipulated at the crime scene. But the authors of the book Exquisite Corpse take that theory one step further. Further, they submit that a group of people familiar with surrealism may have tried to recreate an exquisite corpse game with the body of this young woman.

[Henry Zabrowski]

What's so hard is to be the first one. And then you got her there and she's alive and stuff, and you're like, what if I just put a hat on her? You know? And then other guys like, well, then what do I do? Like, put a sash on her or something. And next thing you know. Honestly, you just become fashion designers and you're just dressing this woman.

[Marcus Parks]

If she was art, it could have birthed the first murder critic.

[Henry Zabrowski]

And that's what we are. That's what we are.

[Ben Kissel]

You know what?

[Henry Zabrowski]

I don't get it. Two thumbs down. Sorry. Uninspired.

[Ben Kissel]

Well, in keeping with the general idea of the exquisite corpse game, multiple people may have taken turns with Elizabeth Short's body, each of them inscribing their signatures on her legs, genitals, torso, breasts, and face.

[Henry Zabrowski]

What if I just. Again, what if I just wanted to draw on her? We're artists, right? Can I just draw a circle on her?

[Ben Kissel]

Here's a knife. Have fun.

[Henry Zabrowski]

I just wish I could get a marker or something. I get a paintbrush.

[Ben Kissel]

No knives only.

[Henry Zabrowski]

I just. I hate this surrealist thing. I thought this was imagination. The D could be for Dali.

[Ben Kissel]

You could.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Oh, he did it with the lobster. The lobster did it.

[Ben Kissel]

Or Ducon.

[Marcus Parks]

And all the poop in her from poop caso.

[Henry Zabrowski]

That doesn't even make sense. I wouldn't allow that. That doesn't make any sense. If it was piss, I was.

[Marcus Parks]

I realized that she wasn't filled with piss. They changed it at the last time.

[Ben Kissel]

Quick thinking, true comedian.

[Henry Zabrowski]

You're just sitting here doing piss. And, man.

[Marcus Parks]

She'S a regular cum. Brand?

[Henry Zabrowski]

No. Rembrandt. No. We're now. We're over. We're gone. We're in the Palisades.

[Ben Kissel]

Well, thus inspired, the authors wrote, this group would have crafted what they viewed as the most exquisite corpse of all.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yes. Would not be the most devilish of all.

[Ben Kissel]

And that's the kind of. The problem with a lot of these theories is that they do require cartoonish, villainous characters.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah. Well. And I also will put the Exquisite Corpse book, which I love, and I love all the art history in it. I will put it almost in the true crime, like overboard world of thinking. They kind of act like they're treating the surrealist painters like the West Memphis Three. Just because they were like, hanging out and doing all these like, quote unquote, like weird, dirty things like that. They were then criminals. It kind of feels like you're getting mad at people for listening to Marilyn Manson and you thinking it's gonna ca. It's causing school shootings where it's like, no, this is. That artists are inherently. I love artists. Yeah. You're not going to do this. It's just physical. They're not physical. They're mental. You know what I mean? This is a mental, spiritual creatures. Like, it's going to be the big jump. The idea of four of them getting together to do it would be, I think, a bit impossible. Especially if somebody like George Hodel. Because unless George Odell killed all of them, the only way this hold. That theory to me holds is that George Odell did the black Dali, but he also killed everybody involved.

[Marcus Parks]

I just don't think they would stop at one person. I think if it was an art piece, they would kill multiple people. Especially if they didn't get caught and got this much press.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Well, look at Leopold and Loeb. Those are guys that were definitely did it for the art of it. They did it for the mental exercise of it.

[Ben Kissel]

Yes. So now that we've talked about the surrealist links to the murder, let's return to George Hodel and how he came to be connected to the Black. See, while his lawyer did succeed in getting George acquitted by making George's daughter look crazy because of what she'd said about George being the Black Dahlia killer. The plan backfired when the police opened a file to thoroughly investigate George for the murder.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Isn't this interesting in the fact that if this is how much time has changed, we're back in the day they actually were offended by the fact that they thought that he fucked his daughter instead of it, like covering for him. Like they were. They covered for the other people, but they didn't cover for George Odell. They went looking for George Odell. Unlike Jeffrey Epstein, when the entire entire South Florida judicial group all, like, flipped over backwards to make sure that he was fine.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah, no, he. And not in Los Angeles. Not with George Hodel.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Not with this one.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah, well, the cops snuck a bug into Hodel's house and tapped his phone. But because George had connections, he was well aware he was being monitored and therefore engaged in lots of loud sex, erotic poetry readings, and an inordinate amount of toilet flushes to toy with the cops.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Another log gone. Another log missed. I hope you enjoy this next show I'm about to do for you, Lieutenant. Oh, oh, oh. I'm touching my butthole. I'm touching my butthole, Mr. Homicide Detective. Oh, oh, oh.

[Marcus Parks]

I'm shitting on a plate and feeding it to my daughter.

[Ben Kissel]

Come and get me.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Come and arrest me.

[Ben Kissel]

Well, hodot was also aware that his phone was being tapped. And during a conversation with a friend, Hodel said, quote, supposing I did kill.

[Henry Zabrowski]

The Black Dahlia, I couldn't prove it. Now I can't talk to my secretary anymore because she's dead.

[Ben Kissel]

Now, a lot of people have used this statement as proof that George Hodel killed Elizabeth Short. But one has to question why Hodel would say something so damning when he knew the police were listening.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Because why wouldn't they come and arrest him immediately?

[Ben Kissel]

Well, most likely Hodel said it because he knew there was no truth to it. Because Hodele obviously liked playing with people. For example, example, his secretary died in May of 1945, almost two years before Elizabeth Short was killed. In fact, the secretary died before Elizabeth Short even came to Los Angeles.

[Henry Zabrowski]

So the manuscripts that she was asked to burn, whatever that was, filled with.

[Marcus Parks]

A bunch of other haunted shit.

[Henry Zabrowski]

That's the thing. It's like, that's my main thing with George Odell is I think he's guilty of plenty of other things that he didn't want people to know about. He's physically could not have ran into Elizabeth Short.

[Marcus Parks]

I think every suspect has killed somebody but Elizabeth Short.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Everybody has done crime crimes to everybody else. But Elizabeth Short, she is still the only person has not been touched by any one of these people. George Hodel definitely killed his secretary. I think he absolutely is a murderer. I think he's a pedophile and a rapist. But he's not the Black Dahlia murderer.

[Ben Kissel]

See, when it comes to making George a good suspect, the Connections, more or less end with all the surrealist stuff. It's very interesting, of course. Oh yeah, that's why we talked about, about it. It's fascinating to see all these parallels.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Also you wonder if it's just because their goal is to go back into the subconscious.

[Ben Kissel]

Right.

[Henry Zabrowski]

So they're creating these subconscious works of art oftentimes because of the material that they were reading to all the Freudian analysis, all the other stuff, all the.

[Ben Kissel]

Marquis de Sade, it was all very sexual and dark.

[Henry Zabrowski]

So what they were doing was accessing their imagination to be totally pure. But let's just say maybe they had preconceived ideas of the drawings that they wanted, want to make human humanity. They're trying to do what they. They're trying to do experiments. But you're pulling stuff out that just might be really common. One female surrealist, I've got her name. She talked about the bisected woman imagery for as. As a celebration of women. This was like.

[Marcus Parks]

Which only depended the giants.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yes. Yeah, but she said that it was a. It was a way for the essentially these nerdy, sexless men to understand women. Like they actually viewed it as a way for they, they put women on a pedestal in that world that' they were torn apart all the times because they were kind of viewed as sort of like art pieces, which is dehumanized. Dehumanizing a woman. Yeah, but it doesn't mean you're killing them.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah, that doesn't. As far as George Hodel goes, Steve Hodel maintains that George's handwriting is similar to the letters that the so called Black Dahlia Avengers sent. But there's absolutely no evidence connecting Elizabeth Short to George Hodel in any way whatsoever.

[Henry Zabrowski]

There isn't any. The handwriting analysis goes back and forth.

[Ben Kissel]

It really does. No, I mean, like I said, that's something that Steve claims. And you know, there's plenty of arguments to be made against the handwriting analysis.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Did you try to read the chapter on the handwriting analysis in Black Dolly Avenger?

[Ben Kissel]

No.

[Henry Zabrowski]

It's like 40 pages talking about T's and P's, B's and H's and O's and N's.

[Marcus Parks]

How about Q's?

[Henry Zabrowski]

No.

[Ben Kissel]

Uncommon letter. Uncommon letter. I don't think they were in the Black Dahlia Avengers.

[Henry Zabrowski]

It's just this breakdown of like, as you could see with the lilting surface of the, of his second O's within each one of his words. With two O's, you're like, no, I don't. This is not, this is not it's gobbledygook. I'm a fucking jump off a bridge. My ear. One more thing about P's and beast. I'm going to come here, come myself, I'm gonna walk into the fires.

[Marcus Parks]

What do they think about lowercase Js? Because those are very important.

[Henry Zabrowski]

A lot of them really tell you how you feel about certain religions, how crooked your J's are.

[Ben Kissel]

Well, the thing is that two women who knew Hodel, they were convinced that he knew Elizabeth. But most of the people who knew and worked with George Hodel said that he never met her. And Elizabeth Short never mentioned George Hodel, nor did she mention a George Hodel type to anyone she knew. And the thing is that also the people who knew George Hodel said that there was no way he would have like if he would have killed a woman, he would not have displayed her body out for all the world to see and then communicated with the press about it. He would have kept it a secret. Yeah, like George Hodel was a man of secrets.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

I. In my mind it's the. If you did that as a George Hodel, why in the ever living fuck it would ever leave that killing floor? Like I feel like it's one of those things where you would bring people to, to the killing floor.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Your George R. Dell, was he always, he did not like go, he didn't leave his house. You know what I mean? Like the parties came to him, things came to him. So the fact that he would then go out of his way to portray this does it doesn't fit his character.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, but she was hollowed out. They took the blood out of her. You know, maybe they were trying to make it so it wasn't as stinky. They could have, you're correct.

[Henry Zabrowski]

You know they did. They definitely was for transport.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah, but the thing that drives the story the furthest from George Hodel is the location of the the body. Hodel had no reason to be in Leimert Park. It was a 30 minute drive from his home. And there's no reason why George would dump Elizabeth Short's shoes and purse in a trash can on Crenshaw Boulevard. Hodele also didn't drive a black Ford sedan like the one seen on the morning of the body's discovery. Seen by two different people. And most importantly, he was recovering from a heart attack in January of 1947. That heart attack had kept him in the hospital for a month. Which meant that he was far too weak to murder Elizabeth Short with such brutality. Never mind strong enough to move the body. Basically, Hodel was investigated because he had bribed his way through his incest trial and had skated the charges.

[Henry Zabrowski]

And he was probably a pretty well known creepist.

[Ben Kissel]

Yes. Yeah. And I think that George Hodel, he's one of those characters, and I think people like him and Jeffrey Epstein, that they do have their claws in deep to certain people in the government and certain people out there, like in administrative positions, but others take one look at him and say, I'm not going within 10ft of that guy, and I want to see that fucker in a jail cell.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Because they were correct. You look at somebody, Jeffrey Epstein, technically, I mean, yes, he was a financial advisor, but the way he really made his money was by being a spy. And then you also wonder with George Hodel if he did something along the same lines.

[Ben Kissel]

Well, two members of the DA's office were demoted because they lost George Hodel's incest case. So it said that the DA put him on the suspect list for simple revenge.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Totally can see it. I, I, that makes total sense.

[Ben Kissel]

Let's just make his life hard for a little while.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Piece of shit. He thinks he's been bigger than us. He's not bigger than me. We're the gangsters. We're the lapd. He's not bigger than us. This whole theory, so, like, leading from last episode into this episode, this is getting towards the end of the actual, of the time investigation.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Because as they were going, there were. This is one of the last real suspects that they hit, too. So by the time they got to him, I think they were so angry at being questioned for so long that they were like, you're not bigger than us. Like, we cover up other crimes, buddy. Yeah, like we cover up. We are. We are. Yes, we're the lapd. Yes, we run a racketeering organization. Yes, we do human trafficking, but we're not pedophiles. Like, that was the line at the time. Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

They're like, it was an embarrassment to them. And that's kind of the reason why they threw the book at OJ when they finally got him for the trophy thing.

[Henry Zabrowski]

They had to, because someone had it. Someone had to say something.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah. What they call it? The fifth quarter.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah. Now, Steve Hodel still believes wholeheartedly that his father is the best son suspect. Despite his best efforts, though, Steve says that the Black Dahlia case is still unsolved for several reasons. For one, when Elizabeth Short was still alive, she obscured her life to everyone she knew, which makes putting together a clear Picture of her. A near impossibility.

[Henry Zabrowski]

That.

[Ben Kissel]

That is actually. That's absolutely true. But it's not proof of George Hodel's guilt.

[Henry Zabrowski]

No. It just shows how difficult it is to investigate a crime when the killer. Like what we are now in the world of in these theories is that the killer was not remotely connected to Elizabeth Short. Did not know Elizabeth Short. Was not conn. To anybody around Elizabeth Short. There is a. This is somebody outside as an outside actor. And it's extremely difficult to catch somebody for a motiveless crime.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah. Especially if they just do it once.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah. They do it for sexual thrills.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah. Because that's the reason why most serial killers get caught is that it's not necessarily because the cops are so damn good at their job. It's that when a serial killer kills another person and another person and another person, they get sloppier the longer they go on, and they eventually just make a mistake that's so egregious that basically they fall into a copy slap.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah. It just happens again and again.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Start getting cocky.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, second, Steve says that reporters and detectives have bought into various myths about the case which have clouded their minds to the truth. Which is what every single person who covers this case says about every other person's theory that isn't their own.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Exactly. That's why I am sick of the various myths and I'm sick of people having their minds clouded because I know what happened. We talked about it last episode. Her waste us did that. She did this to her herself.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

This is suicide. All of this was the simple cool.

[Ben Kissel]

Actually, I did read, and I think. I can't remember which book it was, but when they were at the crime scene, one of the detectives did step over Elizabeth Short's body and say, God, these suicides just break me up. Jesus Christ.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Jesus Christ. People are made out of Legos.

[Ben Kissel]

But most importantly, from Steve's perspective, he claims that every detective who worked this case has intentionally sanitized or destroyed information connecting the killing to George Hodel. Because of Hodel's powerful connections and the possible compromise he may have obtained on those connections during his many orgies.

[Henry Zabrowski]

It's been like 80 years when that stuff is. Some of that heat died down on some of these.

[Ben Kissel]

It's all been burned away. It's never coming back.

[Marcus Parks]

You know, I've never been to an orgy without a bunch of cops.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Somebody's got it. Someone's got to hold the line.

[Ben Kissel]

That is true.

[Henry Zabrowski]

That is absolutely. With all the ticker tape everywhere. And you got all the cars driving through, they got the cuffs.

[Ben Kissel]

I mean all the orgies that I've been to have been pretty chill affairs.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I've watched a lot of orgies through glass. And what I've noticed from watching them, I can see that yes, humans do need to communicate, don't they?

[Ben Kissel]

Orgies are more awkward than anything. Yeah, I bet they're very awkward.

[Henry Zabrowski]

I just know I come in three minutes and I can't imagine the hang. I can't imagine rice soon as I've done blown. And I'm just sitting there like, well, okay, well so can we get food or.

[Ben Kissel]

And that's the awkward part.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. And then, well, I guess let me let you. Let me let you go.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Imagine if they were all great conversationalists. They wouldn't have to each other.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Then it would turn into an improv show.

[Marcus Parks]

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[Ben Kissel]

Well, Steve also claims that a string of dozens of unsolved Los Angeles kidnappings and murders suddenly stopped in 1958 when George Odell moved to the Philippines, which is where he died sometime after, in fact, Steve lays dozens of murders at his father's feet, making George Odell one of the most prolific serial murders of his day.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Well, this is the issue. The issue is what he lays on George Hodel after the fact. It'd be different. I honestly think it would be different if he just. He killed a black doll. Yeah. And that was like, it. Like, if it was just that and he wrote the one book, I'd actually be way more, like, willing to believe the theory. But then it's like eight books later now, it's like, he blew up the Hindenburg. He's the Zodiac killer. He's the fucking Zebra Killer. He shot Abraham Lincoln. Like, every single crime that was around, he just applied to his father.

[Marcus Parks]

How little was he around his own dad?

[Henry Zabrowski]

Very little. That is true.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah. Yeah. Very, very little. But in the end, as much as I admire Steve Hodel's enthusiasm, I agree with the many people who say that there's just not enough evidence to make George Odell, the one who killed, mutilated, imposed Elizabeth Short. As far as the surrealism angle goes, though, I'm not going to say that a surrealist artist murdered Elizabeth Short for an art piece. But it is possible that surrealist art, however unconsciously, may have influenced the killer as opposed to being a straight up inspiration.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Well, we. Yeah, because, you know, it was mainstream.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah, Well, I mean, by the year Elizabeth Short was murdered, it wasn't necessari mainstream in America, like, but it was still pretty popular, you know, using it in, like, commercials.

[Henry Zabrowski]

It was on. It was in, like, magazines. It was very fashionable.

[Ben Kissel]

It's around.

[Marcus Parks]

It's a mainstream, like, amongst artists. Probably.

[Ben Kissel]

Oh, very much so.

[Henry Zabrowski]

They were using it in commercials like Salvador Dali was on television.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah. And, I mean, it had certainly stabbed its way into the collective unconscious of the country. And it is possible that whoever killed Elizabeth Short may have either seen some surrealist artwork or may have accidentally tapped into surrealist imagery during the murder and the posing of the body. Because the similarities between the crime scene and the dozen dozens of surreal art pieces is just too crazy to ignore.

[Henry Zabrowski]

But there's also. There is. Which we're going to get into now. There is a practical stuff. There is practical things that could have happened.

[Ben Kissel]

Well, as far as the bisecting of the body goes. Yes. But as far as the posing goes, unless the very specific way in which everything was left.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Unless you flop a bag down with a body in it and you drag it out by the arms, you leave it one side, you grab out, you have that bag, you put it back in the car, you get the other half of the body come back out. Drag, Drag it out, flop it there, you're running, you're not even thinking about it. You just dragged it and you've left it arms open like a wheelbarrow, maybe.

[Marcus Parks]

Do you. Were there, like, footprints around and stuff?

[Henry Zabrowski]

No, they all got destroyed by the reporters of the police.

[Ben Kissel]

There was one footprint. Yeah, there was one footprint, but it didn't match anything that they ever found. Well, FBI serial killer criminologist John Douglas does not think that the Black Dahlia killer is an art lover, nor does he think that our main suspect, Leslie Dillon, is the culprit. And this brings us to the next section of our episode, the profile.

[Henry Zabrowski]

We're going to nail it down. We're getting them.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah. Now, I know some people have problems with John Douglas, but while he can be hit or miss, you have to admit that he does sometimes nail it. So his opinion on who might have killed Elizabeth Short at least warrants a listen. John Douglas is the guy that mind, like he wrote Mine Hunter and the TV show was, you know, based on him and so on and so forth.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Why?

[Marcus Parks]

I want to hear what he has to say.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Here's the thing. He created modern profiling. And so anything that you could say, yes, I don't think he's 100% on the money, but if there's one person that knows and then has researched the criminal mind for 10,000 hours, it is John Douglas.

[Ben Kissel]

So in his profile of the Black Dahlia Killer, John Douglas surmises that the man who murdered Elizabeth Short was white and in his late 20s, possibly older, but Possessing no more than a high school education racist, this man lived alone and worked with his hands instead of his brains, possibly as a butcher, slaughterhouse worker, or some other profession where buckets of blood was the norm. At the very least, this man might have been a hunter who knew how to field dress a deer. The killer, Douglas continued, was compulsive, patient, rigid, and deliberate in everything he did. And when he drank, he was likely to become even more of a difficult person. Because of this, the killer probably had a record for either threatening or assaulting someone with a knife. Lastly, the killer probably frequented sex workers and was under a lot of financial and personal stress in the time leading up to the murder. As far as how the murder went down, Douglas painted a picture in which the killer and Elizabeth Short spent several days together. Days that the killer would have spent drinking. At one point, Elizabeth may have rejected his advances or mocked him for some physical or mental disability. And when that conflict met the underlying stress and the alcohol, the killer snapped and took out all his rage on Elizabeth. As far as cutting her in half went, that was just to make the transport of the body a little easier.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yes.

[Marcus Parks]

Which is where we land on almost.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Everybody, pretty much, most part, some people still like, because this is a surrealist. Yeah.

[Ben Kissel]

If you're. Yeah. If you're in the hotel camp, then her body was cut in half deliberately as a part of the art piece.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Ben Kissel]

But for Douglas and those who subscribe to his profile, the location where Elizabeth's body was found is the single most important clue.

[Henry Zabrowski]

This is, I believe this. This is what I. This is my big thing. Okay.

[Ben Kissel]

Douglas suggests that the killer, quote, wanted to put the fear of God into the neighborhood in Leimert park for personal reasons.

[Henry Zabrowski]

And part of the reason why I agree with this is the old timey pictures. If you go back and look at the Black Dahlia crime scene, one thing that's particularly very interesting about the field is how literally how flat it is. They said that from that. That street, on a clear day during that time period, 1947, you could see the Hollywood sign. And so this thing was flat. This is flat, flat, flat. It's a canvas. It's literal. And the way it was placed was so obvious. It was so it. It was obviously what we've been talking about forever. It was meant to be seen. Whoever did this wanted people to see it. And it's. Who's going to see it? Yes, the world. But first, Lament Park.

[Ben Kissel]

As far as personal reasons go, the killer may have been working a construction job in the area that was put on hold. Or he could have had an emotional connection that was severed. Like I say, he played sports in a field that was bulldozed for new housing developments. He'd be mad at the neighborhood. It's like basically this guy is. Who's mad at the neighborhood.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah.

[Ben Kissel]

Or mad at somebody in the neighborhood.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah. The T ball coach.

[Marcus Parks]

He did it seems like they're were mad at Elizabeth Short. Yeah.

[Ben Kissel]

Also mad at Elizabeth Short, but mad at the neighborhood as well. But no matter what it was, the killer almost certainly had a personal connection to Leimert park or specifically that street or that block. Additionally, Douglas thinks that the killer's behavior after the body was found would stand out because he would have been anxious about leaving behind evidence or about someone seeing him dump the body. His neighbors may have noticed him cleaning his car or his home in a panic. They may have seen him ravenously consuming every piece of media about the murder. He would also have been heard ranting about how ineffective the police were in their investigation and about how Lert park used to be a safe neighborhood.

[Henry Zabrowski]

You see this time and time again, zero killers. More often than not, they're cop groupies. They like to go and they like to hang out. They go to where the crime happened again and again and again. They go and they talk to police that are actively investigating the crime because they're obsessed with their own crime. And half of them fancy themselves a police officer.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah. And they also like to hear the cops describe the crime back to them. And they're also trying to see how much information the cops have and if it's possibly running towards them.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yes.

[Ben Kissel]

Okay, but this guy's need to consume information may have inspired him to create his own news stories, which is why he mailed Short's belongings to a newspaper instead of the police and why he communicated with them for a short time afterward.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Because we still believe that the person who sent the Mark Hansen book and all of the her personal effects if isn't the killer, knows the killer and has access to the killer or just found the.

[Ben Kissel]

That's the other. That's the other possibility is that he may. May have just found it in a trash can and decided to have fun. You know, you just. You really have no fucking idea.

[Henry Zabrowski]

No.

[Ben Kissel]

As far as why there were no more killings in the same style as the Black Dahlia murder, Douglas thinks that the killer removed himself from society by either engaging in a concentrated campaign of self destruction or by committing himself to a mental institution. It's also possible, Douglas thinks that the killer just drifted away into the darkness after it became apparent that the police were never going to come close to linking him to the murder of Elizabeth Short. Now, one of the people who thinks that there's very much something to John Douglas's profile is a former Los Angeles Times reporter named Larry Harnish. We're finally here. To Larry Harnish.

[Henry Zabrowski]

I want to tell you, Larry, you got a good sense of humor already. And listen, we're here.

[Ben Kissel]

We're here.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

We're here. We're helping.

[Ben Kissel]

We're around. Yeah. And that brings us to the third section of this episode. The actual good suspect now, author Larry Harness disputes almost every fact about the Black Dolly, a case that. That's been put forth, and says that he has the proof to back up most of his debunks, if not all. But he's waiting to release this information until he finds a publisher for his Black Dahlia book, which is totally understandable. See all that. I'm saving it for the book argument. That might sound a little cagey. I'll say that the theory Larry Harnish puts forth as far as who he thinks killed Elizabeth Short is highly compelling. I, for one, would absolutely read his book once it gets to a publisher, because it does seem like Larry might have the goods to blow the lid off this whole thing.

[Henry Zabrowski]

He's got two things that I like. Number one is I love his attitude. Right. He's at. He says that Black Dahlia changed his life. He doesn't like true crime. He hates the rest of true crime. But he says that his job is to take. He's trying to take the story. Right. He's trying to flesh this out fully. Number two, I kind of love a.

[Ben Kissel]

Guy who hates the genre he's in, though. I kind of like that. I kind of like that always.

[Henry Zabrowski]

It's like, I didn't expect to be a podcaster.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

And then number two is like, he says, so, yes, all this. He has all this proof that we're waiting to hear on. And. But. But I. I do think that it's in there because what I know that when he does have access to files that are no longer available.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

And he talks about them all the time. And he also says the only actual dependable information that you could tell about the Black Dahlias from the original newspaper clippings.

[Marcus Parks]

Of course, that makes a lot of sense. And also, it's not like the killer's out there killing people. You know, it's like the information isn't hurting the world. If he Keeps it secret for now for his own good. So no good on you, Larry.

[Henry Zabrowski]

We just want to find out what. The exact details of how he debunks everything. That's what I want to know.

[Marcus Parks]

Publish the book.

[Ben Kissel]

Now, as far as how Harnish got into the Black Dahlia scene, he was a copy editor for the Los Angeles Times who got an assignment to write a 50th anniversary story about the Black Dahlia murder in 1997. And he soon became obsessed, like so many others before and after.

[Henry Zabrowski]

I literally don't know what I'm going to do after the series. I've been consuming nothing but Black Dolly information for about a month.

[Marcus Parks]

It's got you to stop talking about drones, which is wild.

[Henry Zabrowski]

It's. It's the only other thing I can talk about.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah. Well, so far, Larry Harnish has interviewed 150 people, including people who knew Elizabeth Short personally and members of the Short family.

[Henry Zabrowski]

He got everybody.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah. As such, Harnish obviously feels quite close to the story and wants to reclaim Elizabeth Short from what he calls the Dahlia freaks.

[Henry Zabrowski]

That's me. I'm a Dalia freak. You better come and punish me, Larry. Oh, you got a problem, Larry? Why don't you come down and give over? Oh, Henry, I spank it because I need some discipline. I'm just a dirty old stinky dolly.

[Ben Kissel]

A freak.

[Marcus Parks]

Side Stories LP well, he also.

[Henry Zabrowski]

I remember, you know why I liked him the f. One of the first things I liked him is I watched one of his October amas, and the first thing he said, he's like you. I don't want to see a single black Dalia costume on Instagram.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

He was like, I don't want to see one. It gets me angry.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah. That's intense.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

[Ben Kissel]

Now, when Harnish started looking into the story, he was focused on Leimert park, because he, like John Douglas, believed that the location of the body was the most important clue. But after looking into the history of the neighborhood from every possible angle, the most interesting thing about it was that a famous mobster lived just a few hundred feet from where Elizabeth Short's body was found. And. But that was more or less common knowledge by that point. But In August of 1997, a filmmaker sent Harnish a box of materials related to the case. And amongst the paper paperwork was a wedding certificate for Elizabeth Short's older sister. When the witness listed for the wedding, her address was 2959 South Norton Avenue, which was exactly one block from where Elizabeth Short's body was found.

[Henry Zabrowski]

And he said, which I do agree, he was like, this seems to be up a key. Like, this is a big key to this case that we have not seen yet, which is what puts Elizabeth Short anywhere near Lamont Park. Like, what puts her there directly.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

And having her older sister be connected to somebody that lives in the very block where she was put is so suspicious.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

I don't know what to say.

[Ben Kissel]

I mean, it's fucking. It's huge. And it's completely verifiable. Like, this is something. There is no rumor here. There's no he said, she said. This is paperwork. There's a paper trail.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

And the witness of a wedding is obviously someone who's incredibly close. Close to the family.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Well, they said it was. Technically, they said it was whoever they could get, but it was a neighbor. It was somebody that they knew.

[Ben Kissel]

So it was someone from. It was. Actually, they went to their church. They went to church together?

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah. From Presbyterian people.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah. Well, as it turned out, this witness was the daughter of a prominent Los Angeles surgeon named Walter Bailey, a surgeon who was, well, capable of bisecting a body now.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah. Because they own the house that the witness lived in. So first, then he's like, all right, who lives at this house? So he found it belonged to Walter Bailey, and he was a surgeon.

[Ben Kissel]

Now, that alone doesn't make Walter Bailey a suspect. But when Harnish began looking more into Bailey's story, he found a heretofore undiscovered web of scandal and controversy, which all pointed towards Bailey being the guilty party here. See, Bailey was a respected Los Angeles surgeon in the 1930s up until the early 40s, and he had a private practice just five blocks from the Biltmore Hotel. That's, like I said, like the. The little pieces just kind of fill in, like, bit by bit by bit.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Ben Kissel]

If you. Because you. If you'll remember, the Biltmore was the last place that Elizabeth was seen alive. But by 1946, Walter Bailey had fallen on relatively hard times, having lost much of his status as a surgeon because he was suffering from early onset Alzheimer's disease, and his personality was changing as a result.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Oh, kill. I mean, I'll have breakfast. Are you my son? Good.

[Ben Kissel]

Bailey was, therefore, he was under a lot of emotional and financial pressure. That ticks off a big box on John Douglas's profile. Even more stressful, though, was Bailey's personal life. During the time of the Black Dahlia murder, Bailey was in the process of separating from his wife because he'd been having an affair with a fellow doctor. This doctor had immigrated from Austria during World War II and had become a partner in Bailey's medical practice. Now, multiple people said that Walter Bailey had become a totally different person in the last years of his life. He actually died not too long after Elizabeth Short was killed. Like a little under a year, right?

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yes.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah. And his death certificate listed a condition called encephalomalacia, which might explain quite a bit here. This condition, encephalomalacia, effectively shrinks the brain and causes mental impairments that can lead to atypical violence.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Dude, that's what the wife was saying, that he had changed into somebody else when she was dealing with him, all of a sudden he was. He'd slipped into this early onset dementia, and it made him extremely mean. And then. Have you seen the pictures of Alexandra Partika?

[Ben Kissel]

Nuh.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Dr. Partika.

[Ben Kissel]

His not. Let's not get too many names in here.

[Henry Zabrowski]

I love. I love her.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, okay. Oh, the Austrian doctor.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, yeah. Hers.

[Ben Kissel]

No, she was fleeing the Nazis.

[Marcus Parks]

Oh, okay.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah, she would. She looked evil. She had an evil face. Continue.

[Ben Kissel]

Well, Harnish also spoke to a professor of neurobiology who said that Bailey may have suffered a series of dementia related mini strokes that could have resulted in lower impulse control when it came to violent and or sexual urges, but would not have greatly affected his ability to be an effective surgeon. But most interesting is what went down with Walter Bailey's lover. See, Bailey changed his will In December of 1947, almost a year after Elizabeth Short was murdered and just before he himself expired.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, you had to take her out of the will because she was dead.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah, that's the thing in the change. Bailey disinherited his wife and his adopted children, leaving half of his estate to his siblings and the other half to his Austrian lover. Yes, who may or may not have been controlling Walter when his mental faculties faltered.

[Henry Zabrowski]

That's their saying that maybe he pulls Elizabeth Short on there. They're playing these weird games with his new hot, Austrian evil wife. Right. Girlfriend. Whatever.

[Marcus Parks]

That is how you do a C section.

[Henry Zabrowski]

This is how. Yeah. You want to see what happens? Well, it's.

[Ben Kissel]

That's not what Larry Harnish says.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Come on now. Let's get all in. No, I. There's an entire. There's talk about every. Every direction. There's a whole other Dr. Alexandra Partika rabbit hole to go down.

[Ben Kissel]

But Walter hadn't yet divorced his wife when he made this change to his will. So his wife started a lawsuit for her share of Walter's estate, claiming that Walter's lover was blackmailing him him with a secret that would destroy his life. A secret that would be exposed if he ever went back to his family. This isn't. These are court filings. These are. This is. And this was. And this court case was covered in the newspaper like it was a fairly big deal. It was a minor story, actually, in Los Angeles at the time, but multiple newspaper stories about this lawsuit.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

And Austrians love secrets.

[Henry Zabrowski]

They do. They do.

[Ben Kissel]

We know that. We've proved that for a fact.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Very much so. Over little cubby holes.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah, well, but this whole secret keeping mechanism was why Walter cut her and the kids out of his will. Now you can go to Larry Harnish's website, lmharnish. That's H-A R N I S C H dot com. Oh, yeah, yeah. Put in the code Grumpy for 20% off to read his theory as to how the murder might have gone down and why Elizabeth Short may have called Walter Bailey from the biltmore Hotel on January 9, 1947.

[Marcus Parks]

In fact, you could rent a room at his place. You can stay there and he'll just talk at you all night.

[Henry Zabrowski]

The key, though is don't even bring up George Hodel because you will be on the street.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Ben Kissel]

But the most important thing linking Bailey to Elizabeth Short is the body's location.

[Henry Zabrowski]

This is. And I just can't. It's the. How do you put it? It's the only evidence. It's the only actual evidence that actually points towards an actual suspect. It is the. In terms of that, we know something about what puts her in that field.

[Ben Kissel]

So there's one. There's one investigative direction. Yes.

[Henry Zabrowski]

That is the only one we found.

[Ben Kissel]

Well, going off Douglas's theory that the killer had an emotional connection to the neighborhood. Walter Bailey's wife was living at the house in Leimert park at the time. And it's assumed that Bailey left the body just a block from his wife so he could frighten her and put the fear of God into the neighborhood, as John Douglas put it.

[Henry Zabrowski]

And that would fit the profile.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Ben Kissel]

Now, Larry does hold back on quite a few details that I would love to hear explained further. And I. I truly do believe that he has the goods to back up his claims.

[Henry Zabrowski]

You know why I do believe the goods that he has? Because of how much I've listened to him. And I've listened to him for hours and hours and hours and hours. And the. His AMAs people are just asking random ass questions and he he's got an answer. He says, I know. I like when he says I don't know because he doesn't know. I, I see him saying, I don't know. He's enough answers. And he's also like, he has an answer for everything. He says it's all in the book. And it's like, I just want to read the goddamn book. Yeah.

[Ben Kissel]

I mean, you want to scare your.

[Marcus Parks]

Ex wife, though, you don't kill another woman.

[Ben Kissel]

That is the true.

[Henry Zabrowski]

No, it's flimsy, but it is as flimsy as the rest of it.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah, I don't like that's the thing is that like, it is a connection. It's just the motivation is a little like, I don't know, it's a little wonky. Yeah. Like the motivation.

[Henry Zabrowski]

A window.

[Ben Kissel]

Well, yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

This is the thing.

[Ben Kissel]

You're also talking.

[Henry Zabrowski]

That's honestly, Eddie, great advice.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

You have an ex wife. Great advice. Don't kill a woman and leave it in her neighborhood. Just break her windows to scare her a little bit. Yeah. I think that this is different. But this is the problem, right, Is that there is. This is the best one. And it's still not particularly great.

[Marcus Parks]

I'm still on Leslie Dylan and Mark Hansen.

[Ben Kissel]

Sure. And so am I. I mean, that's the. I, I really. I. To hear Larry Harness's explanation as to why, like Walter Bailey would send all the. To the newspaper even if he was in a debilitated mental state. It doesn't make a lot of sense.

[Marcus Parks]

It could have been another person threatening him.

[Ben Kissel]

Or it could. Yes, it could be, yes.

[Henry Zabrowski]

But it could also be he.

[Ben Kissel]

But who is the soft voice man? Like, you know, who called like before.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Sending the shit, claiming, you know, but.

[Ben Kissel]

The thing is, but the soft voice man called and said that he was going to send shit before he sent the shit. So it could still.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Unless what we were saying before, that he just knew who did it versus did it.

[Ben Kissel]

Or he may have just found the shit and decided to play his own game. That's also possible.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Larry Harness, which I do sort of agree with. I do think a lot of this has to do with that. He was a high profile case and a lot of people are trying to get in on it. So there was like, people were playing games. He thinks that the Black Dahlia Avenger was a prankster, which I think that goes. I think that might go too far. I don't know. It's a hell of a prank. It is. It's the truth. It is. Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

See, Ashton Kutcher pulling this shit.

[Henry Zabrowski]

The only prank that Ashton Kutcher could pull off was convincing us all that he's a normal human being.

[Ben Kissel]

But as far as why Harnish couldn't get his book published, he thinks that it's because Steve Hodel blew up the Dahlia investigation with his book, Black Dahlia Avenger. Not surprisingly, Harnish does not think much of Hodel and his theories. But the two of them do agree that Leslie Dylan was not the man who killed Elizabeth Short.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Larry, I'm not trying to be angry with you. It's the fact that the story, the George Hodel story, scratch. Great for tv. It's great for tv, it's great for movies. It's the funnest storyline. It's the one with the most fun characters. It's got the most LA history that everybody likes to hear about. There was an entire television show that was made about this, the entire fabrication of the George Odell story that even blew that further, even exaggerated it further. So that's why they like the George Hodel story. Larry, I think you're more correct, but the other one's more fun.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah, well, concerning the Leslie Dylan. Sorry. Harnish says that author Pew Eat well cherry picked information to make Dylan look like the only possible killer. Harish believes that Dylan was absolutely in San Francisco at the time of the murder. And if he said. If Eat well had talked to him for five minutes, he would have told her so.

[Henry Zabrowski]

No, Larry, we're answering your calls, okay? You're here. We're talking with you about it, man. All right? It's not like these other people won't.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah, Tarnish actually doesn't like any of the Black Dolly books out there. And he has something to say about every single one severed by John Gilmore. 25% mistakes and 50% fiction.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Boom. Done. Got you.

[Ben Kissel]

Black Dollar Avenger. Fabricated, crap roasted Black Dahlia files. Painfully stupid.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Larry, can I just ask, honestly, you didn't do this, right? As a toddler, did you do this as a toddler?

[Ben Kissel]

And personally, I still think Leslie Dylan's a pretty good suspect despite the problems. And I. I guess maybe I should say that, like, Mark Hanson is still a really good suspect as far as being involved goes. But, you know, I'd love to be proved wrong if there's a more story out there, if I could hear all this debunk evidence that Larry Harnish has, I want it.

[Henry Zabrowski]

But I wonder, like, the main explanation would be if it is somebody, if it is Walter Bailey, even just in the line of Walter Bailey, Right. Somebody that he has all the king. He could have been in the neighborhood. All he had to do was take the Black Dahlia. Like see Elizabeth Short on the street. Let's say he is now at top of his fugue. He picks her up for the quote unquote, missing week. She is dead in a. In this man's house like for that week. And then eventually is put outside. Like she's either refrigerated or there's something else that happens within it.

[Marcus Parks]

Can't they tell?

[Henry Zabrowski]

Don't know. I don't know for a while. I don't think. I don't know. If they could. In 1947, I think they would have.

[Ben Kissel]

Been able to tell, like she was frozen.

[Henry Zabrowski]

It'd be different. But if it was a she must have been.

[Marcus Parks]

Someone would start curling up or some shit.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah. If the. If the dead body. If the body was dead for that.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Long, like the Hanes neck.

[Ben Kissel]

He's totally right.

[Marcus Parks]

No more bacon leaving the body.

[Henry Zabrowski]

No more bacons in your black Dolly Haynes white.

[Ben Kissel]

No, I. No, her body definitely would have. If. It would have been. If they. The most likely thing is quite possibly like if we're talking about Walter Bailey here that, you know, she was going through her address book. She just was there for hours trying to call anybody. And then just Walter Bailey was like a name. Maybe she had the address of his office written down, which was five blocks from where she was sitting at that moment. So she may have called him up and said like, hey, can. Think you can help me out? Oh, sure. Thank you. Think maybe you can do something for me? And then, you know, they start hanging out. They hang out somewhere for days. Because that's the thing is that.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Or does he need all of this Unless he just sees her, says, I'll give you a ride. That's all you got to do. He's. She's now in his car. Like if she's just five blocks from him. I'm just saying a motiveless. What we're talking about is a motiveless murder.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

And that is the hardest part is that that's. That is what we're looking for in all of this chaos is the whys. Everyone wants to know why this. We don't even know how. We don't know where.

[Ben Kissel]

Like, yeah, there's still. And there's the connection between, you know, Bailey and Elizabeth Short is that, you know, like Bailey went to his sister, her sister's church. So like, you know, he's a well respected surgeon. So it's. You know quite possible that Elizabeth Short did know, knew or had or friends.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Of friends of friends knew or at.

[Ben Kissel]

The very least had his address. You know, maybe his net, maybe his, I don't know, maybe his number.

[Henry Zabrowski]

But Larry Hardenish is also the one that show that it's the hardest people to get the information from are the people that actually knew what was happening.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Is that the people that would have answered a lot of these questions didn't want to. The family were very closely guarded. And he said, you just noticed that anybody whose life was actually affected by this crime doesn't want to have anything to do with it. But everybody and their mother can't wait to jump in on this story because of just how juicy it is.

[Ben Kissel]

Now, in the end, the thing that makes all this so difficult to piece together is the mystery of Elizabeth Short herself. She lied about her life to just about everyone she spoke to, telling people that she was an actress or a waitress or a war widow or a grieving mother or the grieving mother of a dead child. None of which was true. But because we know so little about the facts of Elizabeth herself, it's difficult to put together a narrative. And it's especially frustrating by the fact that living memory in this case is just out of the reach of present day. The youngest people involved in this now, I think are in their 80s or 90s. And that's like the paper boy.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Oh man. I don't want just hopefully that they are really doing well with the congressional hearings coming up and it's so important for 80 year olds to have something to do.

[Ben Kissel]

Well, that's why the Black Dahlia murder drives people crazy. Why every person who has a pet theory thinks that everyone else is an idiot.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Everybody else is an idiot.

[Marcus Parks]

Fucking dumb, dumb people.

[Ben Kissel]

Stupid.

[Henry Zabrowski]

I know what's up.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah. And why no one can seem to agree on even some of the most basic facts of the case. But if there's a single thing that everyone can agree on, it's that the history of the Black Dahlia herself will forever remain the most elusive mystery of all. And that lost history really is the only thing that could ever put together all the pieces that would give us a clear picture of just who killed Elizabeth Short.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Sir. Saying the person that most obfuscated the person who killed Elizabeth Short was her. Her himself.

[Ben Kissel]

Yes, well, but the person who obfuscated the story the most she did was. Was herself. God help us, because just we can never put together because all of the stories that she told to everybody else, like you just can't you have this entire group, like, you just have. It's trying to solve a murder based on a novel about, like, a novelization of someone's life, you know, like, it doesn't. You can't really. You don't know what's true, what's not. You can't really follow any sort of investigation, and you can't really make it anywhere because Elizabeth herself was not truthful to even her mother. Even. Well, yeah, of course not even her mother.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yeah.

[Ben Kissel]

How many of us are you truthful to your mother, Henry?

[Henry Zabrowski]

I tell her how many times I masturbate every week.

[Ben Kissel]

But her sisters, her friends, you know, like, everybody. She told a different story to everybody she knew and just made it a complete mystery.

[Henry Zabrowski]

I'm hearing you, Marcus. We're doing a fifth episode. No, yeah, no, I'm hearing you, buddy.

[Ben Kissel]

No, I'm done.

[Henry Zabrowski]

I'm hearing it. No. We're about to head into some rough waters.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah.

[Henry Zabrowski]

For this next series. Very excited. We are extremely sorry that we are not in Atlanta.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah, we are.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Currently we are working because we are broken. But we're here in Los Angeles in the center of three different fires. We're not going anywhere. A couple small. We got little baby ones. We got some big ones. We got some baby ones.

[Ben Kissel]

They got the sunset one under control. I think it's back to three.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Ah. I just want to say thank you guys, for people reaching out, asking us if we're okay.

[Marcus Parks]

Everybody is so sweet.

[Ben Kissel]

They really are.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Here's your episode. You got your episode. So, no, we're alive, and we're going to continue forward. And I think that this should just show that Covid didn't stop us.

[Marcus Parks]

Nope.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Nothing stopped. We're. This train goes. This train goes. All of the trains don't go. This train goes.

[Ben Kissel]

One way or another, we figure it out.

[Henry Zabrowski]

This train. And that's what we're going to keep doing. We're going to chug a chugga, chugga, chugging all the way through every single piece of tragedy that 2025 is going to give us.

[Marcus Parks]

This is our version of a fireside chat.

[Henry Zabrowski]

I am physically warm from the flames.

[Ben Kissel]

Yes. Go to patreon.com Last podcast on the left to see us be physically warm. We have video episodes available. You can watch side stories on YouTube. You can also follow us on TikTok and Instagram @LP on the left. Don't forget to check out our Twitch streams at LPN tv.

[Henry Zabrowski]

They're canceled for the week, but they're back. They're on there. They're you can get them on there.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Ben Kissel]

Twitch TV, LPNTV, and see all the VOD stuff on YouTube. And don't forget to come out to see us on tour. I mean, I know we can't make Atlanta, but we're goddamn gonna make it to Texas. Oh, yeah. For our show in Dallas.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, that in Atlanta is postponed. We will be redoing the show. Hold on to your tickets.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Yes. We're coming right back.

[Marcus Parks]

Coming. Don't worry about it. It's definitely gonna happen. We're just not leaving our wives behind.

[Ben Kissel]

Yeah, we're coming back as soon as we can. And yeah, don't forget about shows in Toronto, Detroit, and Nashville. Nashville coming up in the next few months.

[Henry Zabrowski]

And this shit's gonna be good.

[Ben Kissel]

I'm so exhausted, I'm about to die. Can I go home now?

[Henry Zabrowski]

You are released.

[Marcus Parks]

Wonderful job, Marcus.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Really good job.

[Ben Kissel]

Both of you as well.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Really good stuff, guys. Hail sweet Satan.

[Ben Kissel]

Oh, hell.

[Marcus Parks]

Gel Larry Harness.

[Henry Zabrowski]

I don't know what you've done in 10.

[Marcus Parks]

Pound on the man, dude.

[Henry Zabrowski]

I want. I'm gonna buy you lunch. I want to see your dick. Come on, buddy. We're serious broadcasters. We have a New York Times bestseller.

[Ben Kissel]

Unfortunately. Unfortunately, that is.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Larry, does that hurt? I know it does.

[Ben Kissel]

I'm sure it hurts quite a bit.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Fix it, though.

[Ben Kissel]

Sure. It really.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Fix it, Larry. We're trying. We're trying.

[Ben Kissel]

That's what we're here to do. We're really trying to make this book deal happen. We want you to get a publisher.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Just. Larry, as far as. Just don't turn like Zionist. Just don't do bad shit in the next six months. Just stay under the radar and get that book out.

[Ben Kissel]

Just do what most. Just talk about only Black Dolly, and you'll be fine. That's it. Goodbye, Larry.

[Henry Zabrowski]

Which is what this podcast is about to become.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Ben Kissel]

It. It.